Muscle After 40 – Week 1, Day 1

One of the glories of being a reasonably successful and financially secure professional is that I can indulge in buying bad books that generally sit on the bedside table collecting cat hair.

Latest case in point might end up being Muscle After 40: Build Your Best Body Ever in Your 40s and Beyond. It came in over the weekend while I was on the bike, and I did the first workout on Monday. Initial impressions:

  1. I dig the book. There’s 5 whole pages of introduction, and then it’s into the first set of workouts. Good layout, spiral bound so it’s easy to use in the gym.
  2. The illustrations are awesome. Each workout has a pretty good illustration of the exercises to do, and a space RIGHT THERE to write your reps.
  3. Bryan Krahn’s instructions are top notch – no real technical words, pretty much just “pick a weight you can lift for a complete set” with guides as to when you’ll tire easily, and when you can probably lift more than you think.
  4. He doesn’t really repeat himself much. I’ve thought for a while that most fitness and business books were a 10 page paper repeated 20 times to pad out a book that will have the first and last chapters read after someone buys it in the airport. Muscle after 40 fits this description, except it doesn’t repeat and doesn’t waste the pages in the middle, instead providing a useful log.

The 12 week program is divided into 3 parts: First, it’s “Full Body”, which I think is mostly getting slugs like me into the bodybuilding parts of the gym. Second is Upper/Lower, where the workouts will either focus on the upper body or the lower body. Finally, it’s “Push-Pull”, which focuses on the whole body again, ‘cept better.

First workout was in the books. I kinda screwed up and did it as a circuit instead of straight sets – still sweated. My guess is that I’m probably best just resting today and then going to the second day.

Workout was good. Eating was not good – little bit of stress snacking in the AM. Weight is down slightly from where I’m redrawing my peak, but still 20 lbs above where I consider myself fat but healthy.