Thursday, August 13, 2015

Bodyweight Calisthenics Version of the One Day Muscle Blast

I've always been intrigued with this idea and realized recently that I've been practicing a form of it regularly in the bodyweight calisthenics version somewhat accidentally.  Back in the 1950s Peary Rader, of Ironman Magazine fame, published an article on the "One Day Muscle Blast" or "One Day Program".  The idea is that you pick an exercise and a weight roughly half your max and do a set per hour for 12 hours.  You also are supposed to drink lots of milk and rest.  The milk aside, I like the idea so I'm trying it for bodyweight calisthenics.  But since every day is body day for me, I picked three that are easy for me and decided on sets of 25.  I wasn't as regular as every hour.  Instead I did them when I thought of it.  This was not difficult and didn't make me too tired or sore.  It was a little boring.

If you have the patience to look on Youtube you can certainly find modern versions of this program.  But they usually drink protein drinks rather than milk.  I'll never do that.  They also keep it to 8 hours.

This program is for building size and while that's not my goal per se, I do like the mix it up factor.

I did:  25 rows, 25 pushups, 25 squats, as many super sets of these as I could in the day.  Fairly bad form, fast, no locking out.  The idea was to make it pretty easy and something I could do all day.  Never was I even close to failure.

I ended up with 9 total sets but really wanted more like 16.  As the day progressed I tended to forget.

I like this and I'll definitely do it again and with more of a challenge.  Maybe 10 strict reps of each exercise per set?  Or may 6 of the harder stuff (pullups and dips?)

I do like the idea of seeing how many total of each exercise you can complete in a day.  So this time for me it was 25 x 9 of each exercise, or 225 reps.

I need to double that.

This also might be a good program to keep in the arsenal of the aging person.  The older you get the harder it is to maintain muscle mass, and this may be a good way to do that.

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