Our final day of training in Advanced Fitness class is an upper body rotation that again packs in a lot of work in a little bit of time. The rotation is done every minute on the minute for 10 minutes. We start with an exercise for the upper back and more specifically the rhomboids, (a muscle that helps to pull your shoulder blades closer to your mid line). It is a static hold for 10 seconds. Most guys are using 25-35 pounds. The idea is to keep pulling your elbows to the sky.
Harry Mauk, Mp '13, demonstrating the bat wing
The second part of the drill is 3 reps of bench press with 70-80% of the one rep training max. Athletes move up 5 pounds in weight when they are able to get 3 reps on all 10 sets.
Conner Burns, Mp '13, had made every rep of every lift done in class this semester
The final part of the rotation is 2 reps of clapping push-ups. It is the icing on the cake of this day. Lots of power is demonstrated on our high volume rotation days that mixes well with the max effort work done earlier in the week.
Mike Manta, Mp '13, shows an explosive clap push-up
An important point to note is that we slowly built up to this amount of volume. We started with just squats and benches every minute on the minute. After a couple of weeks we added box jumps after squats and bat wing before the bench. After a couple more weeks we added L-sits to the squat rotation and clap push-ups to the bench rotation. The first week with all three exercises crammed into one minute was hard. But now we are acclimated to the work and it's almost time to change exercises or the rotations completely before the results stop coming.
The final part of the Advanced Fitness class that we have left to cover is the daily deadlifting. Of all our lifts I am most excited to see what kind of results we end up with for this lift.
