P90X Chest & Back plus Ab Ripper

Although there is likely little benefit to working the chest and back for triathlons, I spend so much time working the legs that I feel like I should work the upper body as well, in order to keep at least somewhat proportional. I tried a little bit to convince myself that it would help with swimming by strengthening the pulling muscles, but at the end of the day the major improvements with swimming are due to form and streamlining, and not by brute strength.

I originally wanted to do this workout yesterday and have today as a rest day, but other obligations came up and I had to push this workout to today. I decided that was ok, though, since this weekends bike ride wont be working the upper body - so any fatigue introduced should not really hamper me at all.

This is probably the 8th time or so doing this workout, and while I'm still not very strong at it, I've definitely improved. When I first started, I couldn't do a single pull up. I may have been able to do a chin up - but I don't think so. I had to start with my legs on a chair, supporting a significant portion of my weight as I went through the range of motion. Now I can do 5 or 6, but I take a 5 second break in between each one - and its not like the routine is a single set of pull ups and then you are done. It alternates between things like pull ups and push ups - so throughout the 45 minute workout, there are about 8-10 sessions of pull/chin ups. I decided to stop using the chair, in an effort to see if that would help speed things up by exhausting the muscles more quickly. I think the jury is still out on that - it could be that while the muscles are too exhausted to complete a full next rep, they'd still get benefit from using a chair and lifting at least some weight. I guess we'll see after I've gone through a few sessions.

The Ab Ripper workout is something that I think it definitely more beneficial - and something beneficial no matter what the activity is that you do. It's a pretty fast paced series of exercises that completely exhausts one portion of your core (starting with hip flexors, for me) and then move on to the next part (lower abs, oblique's, etc). The nice thing about it is that it only takes about 16 minutes. I still can't keep up with all reps of the exercises - I still have to take a handful of breaks or cut a series of 25 down to 20 because I'm just not as fast as the people in the video are. One day, though.