Year of Strength with Sohee

I know I'm resurrecting a very old post, but the name "Sohee" caught my eye as these were the workouts I did for a while. I subscribed to her monthly programs for about 5 months before switching to one called "Rise." I didn't mind Sohee's, but I wanted something with more mobility and I actually prefer incorporating both lower and upper body workout into one session. The upside to Sohee's were that her moves were fairly basic and straight forward. Basic bench press, squats, hip thrusts, lat pulldowns, pull-ups, etc. The Rise program has some of that along with a lot of interesting KB movements that sometimes make me feel like I'm patting my head and simultaneously rubbing my belly. Which is both fun and humbling. The downside is that I want to be in and out of the gym within an hour and sometimes (especially when I'm waiting on equipment) it takes much longer than that. I do substitute moves if I give up on waiting or cut back a set if I'm not feeling it that day, but I find I'm wanting to tweak these workouts more and more to make them my own. Which I know is perfectly acceptable, I just have the mentality that I have to complete it all.

I haven't revisited this lifting program since I last posted. I just wasn't feeling it right now. I'm sure I'll come back to it at some point, but now is not that point.

I did the Month 1 Upper Body Gym workout this morning. It was straight sets just the like lower body workout. It consisted of 1 arm DB flat bench press, 1 arm lat pull down, 1 arm z-press (ie shoulder press), 1 arm DB rows, 1 arm assisted push-ups, 1 arm rear delt flies and lateral bear crawls. The only thing I wasn't really able to do on the gym workout was the 1-arm lat pull downs. It was way more upper body work than I usually do both in terms of exercises and sets/reps. Since I'm crunched for time in the morning, I did it as super sets instead of straight sets. I didn't love it, but I also didn't hate it. Two workouts in though and I'm not very excited about this program. This may have been more of an impulse buy than a genius buy. Either way, I'm sure I'll make sure of some part of it.

I did my first workout from the program this morning. It was a lower body unilateral and core workout. She provides a dynamic warmup each month that has some mobility drills in it. I started with that. Well, technically, I started with 5 min on the stationary bike just to warm-up/wake up my body (I workout straight after waking up). So: stationary bike 5min, mobility work and lower body workout. The total time for all of that was 40min and I didn't do the rest times as prescribed nor did I do all the prescribed sets.

The warmup and workout weren't too bad. I was a bit annoyed at having to link to videos for every single exercise though. The videos are password protected so when you click the link you have to load the page for the password, enter the password, then load the next page with the video. Under circumstances where I have unlimited time on my hands, this wouldn't have irritated me so much, but I'm under time restraints in the morning and really felt like I was wasting my time watching exercise videos. To fix this, I'm going to go through the workout and watch any necessary exercise videos the night before instead. I remembered (too late) that I used to have to do the same thing with ZGym workouts.

Even though I workout at home, I did the gym version of the workout and it went fine. There were B-Stance squats, B stance hip thrusts, 1.5 rep RDLs (My lower back did not like these!), single leg box squats, single leg DB hip thrusts, single leg BW hip thrusts and then palloff presses. It was a lot more than I usually do in a lower body workout which is why I did about 1 set less of everything than was prescribed.

I'll update with thoughts after I do the first upper body workout on Friday.

You'll have to let us know how you like it and what the workouts are like. I find myself seeking out programs and trainers again. Thankfully, that's no longer as some kind of miracle transformation, solution to all my problems, but as a source of training ideas. Left to my own devices, I get bored with myself. Doing other people's workouts, there is always some fun exercise I haven't done in ages, or some combination I've never tried. It keeps it fresh.

A lot of workouts that say they're 45 or 60 minutes can be broken up or shortened. I'll also say that some of the workouts that seem long are that way because they include a moderate pace and adequate rest. Long doesn't have to equal brutal.