Coming into the Home Stretch

I am just about to begin Week 12 of my strength training program and I cannot believe it is actually, finally here.  I have been following a program that I found in one of Tom Venuto’s books,  The Body Fat Solution.

and every week I have been making small changes… increasing the weight, or adding more reps, or even sets. I have been getting stronger, more flexible and seeing some nice new muscle in my arms, shoulders, legs and stomach.

I have also been enjoying some practical benefits… I can wear my high heeled shoes for several hours now, without my calves complaining and cramping up!  I can hold yoga poses for longer and am able to do some that I never could before. My runner's quads and hamstrings are loosening up.   And I am feeling pretty good about it all.

When I first started this program, I didn’t really expect to finish the whole 12 weeks… I thought I might do 6, and then find something new. I do tend to get a little bored, doing the same workouts over and over.  This particular program has 2 different sets of exercises and alternates back and forth between the 2 of them.  And there are a couple of moves I really don’t care for so I was kind of looking forward to changing it… then I found a web site called Workout Nirvana, written by a trainer named Suzanne Digre.

Suzanne did a guest post for Lindsay Cotter who writes Cotter Crunch, about 5 Ways to Get Better Results From Strength Training.  It made a lot of sense to me and was quite timely.  It was the motivation  I needed to keep going and finish the 12 week of this current program.  Since reading Suzanne's blog on a regular basis, I have come to believe she is a mind reader!  Her blog posts often seem to be written for me.

Another example?  This past week I was thinking about what I might do for exercise after this 12 weeks are over.  I do plan to take some time off over the next couple of weeks and just do some fun activities during the holidays… and I thought that in January I might just start picking a few workouts from Pinterest and do something different every workout, for a while.  Change things up every workout.  Then I read Suzanne’s current blog post about Exercising vs Training and I realized that is just not the way to go to get the results I want.  Thanks for another informative and relevant blog post, Suzanne!

So, I am off to eat my ENERGYbits and then then get going on Workout A.

Do you follow a particular strength program or do you do random workouts?  Are you seeing the results you want?