Round 4: Day 26: Medicine Ball Core Cardio

Today was the first time for this workout. I don't have any medicine balls, but did investigate purchasing one or two. They're expensive: about $29 for a 4 lb ball and $36 for a 6 lb ball. Due to cost, I decided to forego purchasing the balls. A few weeks ago, I dropped into a local sports store and found dumbbells covered with some kind of soft coating. They were much less expensive than the medicine balls and I was going to purchase one or two (at a cost of about $4.50), but couldn't find the appropriate weights. Recently, my next-door neighbour left a milk carton full of steel plate weights at the curbside for trash pick-up. I dipped in and picked out a couple of 5 and 3 lb weights. Instant medicine balls.

The steel plates aren't the ideal shape for this workout (the coated dumbbells would have been fine; medicine ball ideal) but they are certainly an acceptable substitute. The workout starts with a fairly brief warmup; actually, a bit too brief for my liking. I should remember to do some extra lunges and warrior 1 poses to open up my hips and stretch out my legs a bit more. Also, I could benefit from some shoulder stretches, side stretches and shoulder rolls. A modified combination of upper and lower body stretching would suffice.

The workout consists of 4 moves done in rapid successions without pause, then repeated, followed by a brief break. Then, another 4 moves, repeat, and break. There are (I believe) 4 sets of these moves. Tony accidentally missed repeating one of the moves, and repeated the first set 3 times. I'm not really sure what was going on with that, as he is usually rather organized about a workout sequence and keeps a list of moves in front of him. Perhaps he was just a bit tired, or had an off-day.

Most of the exercises involve using a weight; one exercise has you jumping over a medicine ball, Heisman-style. I used the 5 lb weight for all exercises. I could probably increase that to 10 lbs on most of the exercises. After a while, the weight feels a bit heavy, even though it's light. It's the result of keeping it up in the air or swinging it around for so long. The workout didn't feel particularly strenuous in that it didn't have me huffing and puffing, or bending over reaching for my knees, but I did work up a really good sweat and felt limber and good afterwards.

I was surprised that the workout was over quickly and I didn't feel gassed. This is one of the few times that I felt that the workout wasn't challenging enough. For a moment, I contemplated starting the disc from the beginning and doing the entire workout twice; alternatively, I think that an increase in weight will help to adjust the intensity of the workout.

This workout might still have a place in this modified program, but I'll either have to do it twice, increase the weight, or do the workout in combination with another workout. As it stands, it's not really sufficient on its own, even in a Recovery Week.