I guess I need to look up pikes now. Ok just tried to look them up, there are apparently quite a few different things labeled as pikes. If you have a link to a video I would be very appreciative.
I like to do the pikes with my suspension strap:
Our friend Kai Wheeler does them with a stability ball too:
http://kaiwheeler.com/?page_id=1302
http://kaiwheeler.com/?page_id=1298
I like to do the hyperextensions with a stability ball, bracing my feet under my bench, although a lot of people brace them against the wall.
You can get a lot more leverage when the feet are braced under something.
Here's the brand of suspension straps I got. You could probably use them to work in a few more exercises at your bare bones gym:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006V6D6I0/ref=oh_details_o09_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I used to be like you prior to my back surgeries and I really preferred the big lifts and did everything really high weight. I could bench 230-240 pretty easy for 7-8 reps, did shoulder shrugs of 550 for ten reps, things like that. Now a days I am less focused on building big muscles and more on toning the muscles. For me, I seem to notice I have more mobility/usability of my own body with lower weights, than back when I did everything high weight. Not sure if that makes sense or not.
I like a mix of high weight, low rep big lifts and then lighter weight, higher rep smaller stuff to support the big lifts. Abide's term "assistance' exercises is pretty apt here. With the lower weights you can also do stuff with greater mobility.
So, for example, I start my shoulders routine with the military press using a barbell, sitting down, which maximizes the isolation of the targeted muscles. Then I follow that with dumbell presses, also seated, and then stand for shoulder raises, front and side, shoulder swings, and so on. These exercises work the same muscles, more or less, as the military press, but from different angles and with different grips.
Each approach reinforces the other, and the gains seem to come quicker on the big lifts when I do the small stuff too. Part of the idea of splitting things up and trying to exercise first thing in the morning is to make sure I spend more time on the lighter weights. The last few months I've often been rushed for time at the end of the afternoon and so only have time for the big lifts and maybe a few other things. I noticed that my overall conditioning was decreasing or at least had stopped progressing.
Before, like you, I mostly just did the big lifts. Typical young guy approach I guess. You wanna see how strong you can get, right? Now that I'm aging, I value joint mobility and flexibility just as much as strength. And the good news is we don't have to choose! I don't have any strength goals as such, but think there's still a lot of room for improvement just working out 30-40 minutes a day. Then add in 4-5 hours of running per week, and some bicycle commuting, and I hope to be about twice as fit as I am right now in about 1-2 years.
I am curious, since you seem to be splitting your old workout in half basically so you can do these twice a week, are you also planning on adding weight to the exercises since you will have less that your doing on a given day? Even with my circuit style training I am still right at about an hour in the gym plus doing my cardio exercise of the day (1/2 hour to 1.5 hours). In fact some of my weights I could bump up in weight, but the dumbbells in my gym only go to 50lbs so I am trying to make do with the lighter dumbbells for as long as I can before I bump up.
Actually, I'm only doing each exercise once per week. My 'top' or upper body routine has been split into "chest and biceps" and "shoulders and triceps' routines, similar to what I had before. Then my mid-body routine has been split into exercises primarily using cables and those based on rows. For my lower-body, I now do the deadlifts and squats on different days, and then divided up everything else based on their compatibility with those and also on the schedule of the runs. I didn't want the squats and plyo stuff to come before a regular running day.
