Not Just a Man's World

It’s suddenly got a whole lot colder outdoors this week, which also means that it’s got incredibly cold in the gym.

This probably has something to do with our gym being a squat rack, piles of weights plates, a bench and some plyometric boxes gathered together in our garage (with a pull up bar across the doorway).  The garage has no insulation, the metal fronting door has a gap of an inch round three sides (during autumn we’re often found in the gym sweeping up leaves which have blown in under the door) and this summer I finally put draught excluder round the connecting door to the house, so we don’t even get some welcome leakage of house warmth.

Building up a sweat v. cold muscles

Working out builds up a sweat so even in the most glacial conditions I find that I finish some parts of my workout toasty warm.

It’s also important not to go into the heaviest lift of the workout with cold muscles.  The problem with a really cold room is that the muscles rapidly cool down between exercises.  If I do a warm-up lift and don’t change the plates over for the next lift pretty quickly I can lose some of the warm-up benefit from the first lift.

Workout solution

The first solution to the problem is to structure my workouts so that I get a total body exercise in at the start.  These rapidly warm me up through my whole body (rather than just a single muscle area getting too hot), they get the blood pumping, I get plenty of actual workout benefit from making them my primary exercise, and it takes a long time to cool down from a total body exercise. 

The exercises I use to start my 4 workouts are:

• Push presses (twice a week);
• Deadlift;
• Split squats (holding onto the dumbbells gives my upper back a surprisingly big workout).

A clothing solution

I also use layering of clothes to solve the problem – it has become a crucial part of my gym survival. 

I can remove and reintroduce layers depending on whether I’m between sets and starting to get hot, or I’ve just finished an exercise and want to retain some of the muscle warmth while changing the equipment round for the next exercise.  

Light entertainment

Here is a comic example of quite how cold our gym has now got (though I haven’t yet resorted to starting in a coat – that usually happens in late-January when the temperature drops those last few degrees).

This Saturday my first exercise was push presses.  I started my workout in a crop top, thick lumberjack shirt, fleece jumper, scarf and thick woolly hat.  This outfit lasted all the way through my warm up sets and a set into my main workout.

I was cold, ok?

By the end of set one I had abandoned the scarf (it’s pretty difficult doing push presses with a scarf on) and the hat followed at the end of set two.  Eventually, after four sets, I was warm enough to lose the jumper.

Down to a shirt with a look of terror on my face. Not from the cold but from being this many sets into the workout with a PB weight. I was just starting to hurt.

Finally, about eight sets into the exercise (I was doing ten sets), I was too hot with the shirt and was warm enough to get down to bare flesh.

Totally toasty (and no longer scared - we took this after my final set)

The shirt is the most useful of all my gym clothing.  It can be pulled on and off quickly and helps keep in the heat at the end of an exercise.  It may not be the most attractive clothing in the world, but I wouldn’t be without it. 

Who cares what I look like in the gym?  The shirt even got used during my warm-ups in the hotel gym.  All that matters is good form, a good quality workout and avoiding injury.

Related posts:

1. Lessons learned this week: the menstrual cycle and making workouts more challenging
2. Lessons learned this week: Mobility drills
3. Lessons learned this week: grip workouts
4. Lessons learned this week: stress and lifting