Yesterday I had just a single gymnastics move on the plate for my workout. In normal Crossfit mindset, this would be like, 30 muscle ups for time, tabata squats, 100 burbee challenge etc. I decided to just have fun with it and do a couple random couplets. Between clients in the late morning, I grabbed an AbMat and hit the basketball court to perform 200 total walking lunges with 10 sit ups at the top of each minute. Finishing in 6:47, meant I was able to get all 200 lunges in while only doing 60 sit ups (10 at the start of each minute). It was a simple workout that left my legs shaking for a few hours, and, I am surprised to feel some good stiffness in my glutes and quads this morning. I think that 200 lunges is probably a good beginners prescription, while 500 would probably be a little more challenging to someone a bit more advanced.
Later that day, I was at my fathers house fixing up an old, old road bike (cleaning it up, and turning it into a single speed "fixie"!). I walked down to my old middle school/high school jungle gym and set up for what I expected to be a pretty grueling workout: 15-1 pull ups with 10 suermans between rounds for time. This proved to be about as hard as I expected but for totally different reasons. First, the pull up bar was the first in a set of monkey bars that stood about 7 feet from the ground. That meant that any sort of kip that I generated had to be done with my knees completely bent, making the normal controlled momentum of the kip a little tougher than normal. So really, I was just doing a dynamic pull up rather then a full fledged kipping one. The recovery exercise, the superman, ended up being a good recovery for my arms, but not my lungs. I used a platform on the jungle gym that was only big enough to hold my upper body; so my lower half hung off the edge allowing my body to break parallel and putting a ton of pressure on my chest (IE, compressing my lungs quite a bit). Lastly, the main thing causing my time to slip a little, was the bar itself. It was thick, and slippery as hell. My body could easily handle 5+ pull ups at a time no problem, but around 4 or 5 I would just slip right off. So, all those factors included, I finished in 13:03.
I followed everything with 3 rounds of 50 incline push ups (feet up about 3 feet off the ground) un-timed. I felt so strong with these, it was great!
It's so nice to be able to mix in these fun and very different workouts in my days here seeing how overwhelmed I've been. This is not a negative thing at all, in fact, it's been some of the most exciting times in my life preparing for these events and growing my business with a whole slew of new programs (I just tend to bite off a HUGE chunk to work with at all times!). But to be able to make the time to get some good physical activity in each day has really helped keep my mind on top of things. It makes me think of all the times I've heard people talk about how they just don't have the time to get to the gym. Well, at this point, my first response to that is always: you don't need a gym. It is so simple to get a great full body workout in without touching a weight and without taking more than 20 minutes. It's a matter of intensity. Now intensity can mean a bunch of different things to people (and an actual detailed description of it is coming up in a later post focused on the topic), but in the end, it just means challenging yourself to go a little harder, faster, heavier, longer than you feel you can. If you push yourself just that much more, you will see great gains in anything you are working on, work, sleep, family fitness, everything.
I was able to get 20 minutes of workout in yesterday, split up, and it left me worn out, fulfilled and sore the next day.
Never Stop, GET FIT.
Josh Courage
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