This intervention has to deal with trying to increase my total weight and number of repetitions for weight lifting. The main problem I have been having, mostly with my bench press, has to do with being stuck at one weight at times and not being able to increase the maximum lift or get any more reps out of the workout. I have tried to "shock my system" by increasing the weights to a weight that I could only do one or two times. I have also tried building up my endurance through using less weight for more reps at times. No matter which I have tried, I always seem to get stuck at one point or another.
The reason that I chose this form of intervention was because I have tried to talk to many people about why this occurs, but they all seem to agree that it happens to everyone and there is no way to get around it. If I could find a way to avoid this, it would improve my workout a great deal and I would be able to progress at a quicker rate.
Besides with the bench, I will occasionally run into problems with any of the power exercises that I do. The military press, front and back, and 21's cause the most problems next to the bench presses. Since separating both shoulders in a skiing accident, I tend to have pains in my shoulders if I work them too hard. Hopefully, by using imagery and setting some short-term goals I would be able to increase the weight much easier than without. I believe that when I visually see the weights on the bar, intimidation may set in and there may be some doubt. If I am able to switch that to positive thought, it may effect how well I am able to lift the desired weight.
Besides these exercises, I also chose to track the progress of my push up counts based on sets of three and two other forms of curls. On the bench that I used, I used a bar for one form of curls and I also used the bench curl attachment. I tracked these two not because I was having trouble, but because I wanted to see if either...