Life and lifting: cardio plan and looking forward

I guess I'm going to call this and other posts like it "Life and lifting" because this shits short and pretty self explanatory.

This weekend was a very important milestone for me and is something that I really worked hard for the last 2 years.  I got accepted into a 4 year college to complete my degree.  I've been working day in and day out at community college for almost 2 years and it all became worth it this weekend.  Besides the bigger tuition that comes along with 4 year schools, I got into my preferred school and will hopefully become a teacher, showing people how awesome physical education is, as well as a wrestling coach.  Speaking of wrestling, I'll also be able to wrestle at the college level, and hopefully make some waves there.  And what better way to celebrate all of this than by beating a personal best on everyone's favorite lift, the bench press.  I pressed 300 for 11 reps, which beats my last pr by 15 lbs, which was a good accomplishment for me because I felt like my bench has been pretty stagnated since I pressed 4 plates in mid october.  This allows me to Segway into some of the stuff I have been trying in my training.

Since I just hit a bench PR I figured I should lay out what I've been doing differently.  Basically I doubled my weekly volume by adding another pressing day, where I hit a few accessory lifts, some arms, and call it a day.  I've been doing this a few weeks and although it's probably too early to tell if this caused the PR, I think it's definitely a good sign.  It's a lot of light submax work that is targeting power off the chest with Larsen presses, and my triceps with decline close grips.

This leads into my arm work.  I've replaced some light circuit type arm work with heavier arm work spread over 3 days.. my 2 pressing days, and then a few sets on Saturday.  I'm really hoping for some arm growth from this.  I really want to get 18 inch arms and I feel like this frequency approach will help.  I have 3 different movements for my pipes, and will probably swap them out every cycle or so.  I'm not sure if the fat grips are doing anything for size, but they definitely are helping on my grip strength.

Lastly I wanted to explain what I'm doing for cardiovascular training.  I wanted to just include some really low intensity cardio like walking on the weekend, so I'm starting with walks that are about 2 miles long for the weekends.  Eventually I'll progress to light jogs and then go from there, but I mainly want to do that for recocery.  Wednesdays I've decided.to do a shorter, more intense cardio session with the row ergometer, which is actually really fun.  I think im.gonna do something like 5 sets of 300m as fast as I can and.then rest 2 minutes and just decrease the rest time from there.  I'll post the results in a later post.