Psyche!
It's been quiet because this has been a tough and time consuming week!
Monday was a nice little day, skipping for 45 seconds then 12 box jumps which I did on the higher level then rest for a minute for 20 reps. It was a good exercise, nice and steady. I have a fancy skipping rope which counts how many skips you do, and in that set I did 2209 skips which I don't think is too shabby!
Tuesday was meant to be 5 sets of 8 close grip lat pulldowns, single arm dumbbell rows, dumbbell bench press, dumbbell flyes, incline dumbbell curls, standing barbell curls then lat pulldown burnout (100 reps on low weight). I knew it would be time consuming, but I didn't get to the gym til later on because of work, and a boxing class I went to last Tuesday started at 7:30 so I thought I'd give that a go. Once that finished I tried to get stuck into the workout, but got to the dumbbell bench presses and realised I was being lazy in order to rush through the workout, so I was sticking to my 'safe' zone of 14kg. At this point I stopped and thought I'd just do two workouts on Wednesday instead.
So Wednesday I started with Tuesday's workout:
68 kg on lat pulldowns,
12kg on single arm DB rows
1 set 14kg DB bench press then did 4 sets at 16kg DBs
8kg DBs for flyes
At this point, I actually experienced my first pectoral spasms. I usually struggle to work my chest properly because my shoulders tend to take over but I seem to suddenly have overcome that little issue!
6kg DBs for incline curls
10kg standing barbell curls
For the 100 reps lat pulldowns, I tried to do as many as possible with 45.6kg (22.8 each side) but it got hard quickly, I did 30 reps then 20, 15, 30 then another 25. I gave the weight below that a go, but that was only 26kg, it really didn't even feel like I was doing anything so I just stuck to as many as I could with 45.6kg.
And then I did as Monday, with the 20 reps of 45 seconds skipping then 12 box jumps.
Thursday - are you bored yet? Thursday was 100 body weight squats which I did in two sets- one 60, the next 40. Then 60 crunches (in one set), 100 alternating lunges. I did these jumping lunges, 30/30/30/20 (consider the extra 10 a penalty for having to do them in sets). 60 bicycle crunches in one set, 100 knee tucks 30/30/30/20. 100 flutter kicks in one set then 3 minutes plank which took me 3 attempts in 1 minute slots. This didn't take very long at all so I attended a little Combat class at Klick, which was good fun and then went on to muay thai for an hour. In hindsight, I expect I overdid it. I felt great at the time but then today when I came to do Friday's workout (30 mins HIIT cycling 20 secs high intensity then 1 minute 60% effort followed by 30 mins HIIT running, 0.2 miles sprinting then 0.2 miles jogging and so on) I was tired. I did the running first as I expected the cycling would stiffen me up too much to run afterwards. That was fine, I jogged between 5.6 mph - 6mph and ran between 7.5 - 8mph. I ran for the last 2 and a half minutes at 8mph just to push myself that little bit harder. Then came the hard bit. I set myself up to cycle for 30 minutes, but my knees felt stiff and heavy so I thought I'd move to the more upright bikes. After a few minutes on that my hips felt as though they were tightening and I know my body well enough to realise that I wouldn't do myself any favours to push through it. So I tried the cross trainer - by which time I'd already done 5 minutes cycling so I reduced the time on the cross trainer to 25 minutes. I did not do interval training. I was lucky to get 25 minutes done at all, I actually stopped the program twice and tried to get off but a little devil in my brain started yelling at me to 'get your lardy bum back on the cross trainer!' I obliged, but believe me when I say I hated every damn second of it.
On a progress note, I'm quite happy with the small results I've seen so far. I'm 3 weeks in and I definitely feel that muscles are a little tighter, especially around my tummy. Visuals below, although I wouldn't say there's much to see. Excuse the toilet behind me!
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