Today’s workout was different.

Last workout, owner/trainer saw I was leaning a little too far forward when doing squats. I worked to correct that then, but even more so this workout. In fact, I dropped the weight slightly so I could be stricter. The thing is, when I squat without anything on my shoulders, I still lean forward; it’s just how my body structure is to maintain balance. That said, I can still improve my form and did. I “pushed back” so my weight was more on my heels than my toes. I felt my quads working a LOT more. One side-effect was that I worked slower. My reps weren’t powering through, but going slower, probably from 1 second to 2 seconds per rep. There was much more focus on feeling the main muscles contract. I focused harder on just letting that muscle do the work. That is, say on bench press instead of just moving the weight up, I was really intensely focused on just letting my pecs contract and the weight moved up because the contraction pulled my upper arm in. It’s a different mode of thought and movement. I try doing this all the time, but today the focus on that was much more intense than any past workout, and held throughout the workout.

So squats started it off, but it just carried into the entire workout. So yeah, some reps or weight might have dropped compared to the previous workout, but the intensity level was higher and THAT is more important.

This is why I don’t want to rush into a new workout routine yet, because I know I’ll focus more on that routine than these sorts of minute details. The details matter more.