Round 6: Day 60: Run (??!!)

Today is cardio day, and in the spirit of muscle confusion, I decided to abandon my DVD workouts, leave home, throw caution to the wind, and head out for a run. I haven't run since June 18, when my run was truncated by a minor left calf injury, which I've allowed to heal ever since. During that healing period, I've been scaling back a bit on my cardio workouts, substituting One on One workouts for Insanity, and engaging in more yoga sessions to stretch out my leg muscles. At some point, I felt that my left calf had healed, but I was experiencing some minor soreness in my right achilles tendon. I certainly felt some frustration, as one part of my body improved, only to leave another part a bit tender.

But that's all in the past now. It was such a beautiful morning today, and I felt so good, and I had recently purchased a new pair of running shoes (Nike Free Run Plus) that I leapt out of bed, laced up the shoes, and headed out for a run. I was very cautious at first, testing out how the various parts of my body were responding to the run, and I was particularly attentive to how I was landing on each foot and raising each foot off the ground, trying to implement what I've learned from reading The Pose Method of Running. Good news: no pain. I tried to relax on the downhill portions, and increase my speed and gait during the uphill portions, with the resultant increase in heart rate. Everything felt good, I got my heart rate up to 159 (pretty high for an old guy), burned a bunch of calories, and imparted some good stress to my body.

Now, I'm encouraged that I can resume running (not that I did so much before, but I think I'll run more while the weather stays nice), knowing that I can do so without pain. My legs didn't suffer too much, as I was still able to easily ride my bicycle to the office. The ride home might be a different story, but right now, I feel relaxed and good.

This might be a nice insert into the muscle confusion category. Running is something that my body isn't really used to, so the departure from the normal type of cardio workout might help to stimulate a bit of change. At any rate, engaging in a different type of workout has given me some mental benefit, as it's nice to break from routine every now and then.

Round 6: Day 59: Upper Plus

I haven't exactly abandoned my Round 6 schedule, but I do seem to be modifying it on a regular basis. I'm still following the routine where Days 1, 3 and 5 are resistance days, Days 2 and 6 are cardio, and Day 4 is yoga, but the workouts I had originally scheduled to follow seem to have fallen by the wayside due to a variety of factors: slight injury, minor tweaking of body parts, or lack of motivation or desire. I'm not skipping workouts, it just seems that sometimes I'm happier doing what I want to do.

Again when I awoke this morning, I had thoughts of several workouts swirling around in my head including, oddly enough, going for a run. As this was a scheduled resistance day, however, I shelved the notion of running (perish the thought!) and decided to focus on my upper body: arms, shoulders, chest, delts? My lower back felt a bit sketchy due to some bent-over rows I did the other day (manifesting itself, oddly, during my bicycle ride home the other day). My left oblique is a little sore, and I was concerned about straining it. So, I decided not to do anything related to lifting over my head, or heavy curls which might inadvertantly put stress on my lower back. I came to the decision that this might be a good day for Upper Plus, which works most of the upper body without the heavy weight lifting, and offers minor cardio as a side benefit.

Upper Plus is still a good workout for me, although I was rather tired of it following Round 3, when I was doing it twice weekly. I took the added step of doing the workout without any music, probably because I find the soundtrack to this workout more annoying than inspirational, and it made a difference to my temperment. I breezed through the workout, got a good sweat on, enjoyed the variety of moves (with the exception of weighted warrior, which I don't really care for, likely because it really challenges my sense of balance and my shoulder strength), and found the overall experience to be most satisfying. It was a good decision to make, so that I could still get in a good upper body workout without overly stressing sensitive parts of my body.

Modify, modify modify, if you have to.

Round 6: Day 58: Kenpo Cardio Plus

It was a struggle to work out today. For the last while, I've been scraping an underpad off a hardwood floor. It seems that over the years, the underpad has decided to weld itself to the floor. Likely, there was some sort of chemical reaction between the underpad and the floor finish product which resulted in the unfortunate bond. This summer's assignment was to paint my daughter's room and expose the beautiful hardwood floor therein. Unfortunately, what should have been a simple 2-minute procedure has turned into a week of hard labour. On the other hand, this is one of the reasons I work out regularly: to enable me to complete household chores without (too much) pain. My attitude? Underpad Removal X. So there I am, night after night, scraper in hand, removing the underpad. It's actually a great shoulder, core, chest and arm routine. Put on a little music, and do a little scraping. Eventually, the underpad came off, and I was left to deal with removing the residual adhesive. Board by painful board, I rubbed away, until the original colours of the hardwood came back to life and the tackiness of the adhesive was banished. With a P90X attitude, you really can accomplish anything.

All this extra work did sap a bit of energy from me, and I wasn't particularly motivated for a cardio workout this morning. So, I popped in Kenpo Cardio Plus, took aim at my reflection in the mirror, and commenced punching and kicking (no screaming, at least, not yet). It was a fantastic workout, just what I needed, and I worked up a huge sweat and a decent calorie burn. It's important to keep working out. If the workout of the day isn't your thing, do what you want to do. Just keep moving, and keep Bringing It.

Round 6: Day 57: Chest and Back

It's been awhile since I visited this blog, but never fear: I'm still motivated to work out. The balance of Recovery Week slipped by without incident (there just didn't seem to be much to report on), but it consisted of stretching, yoga, a little core work, some light cardio, and more stretching. There usually isn't too much to say during Recovery Week, so I took a mini-vacation from blogging my daily strains and decided to give my digits a few days off to recover as well.

Now, it's back to the grind, with a vengeance. This is the start of Phase 3, where the intensity gets dialled up to an 11 (which is 1 past 10), and major changes are supposed to ensue. Unfortunately, due to scheduling issues, I couldn't get my first workout in on Day 1 of the week, as I had to travel out of town for the day, so I'm going to try to make it up sometime during the week. Today, I did start Day 1 (preferring to start that way, rather than skipping it and commencing with Day 2) and launched into Chest and Back. I was supposed to have done this workout a couple of weeks ago, but substituted 30-15 at the time, again, due to being out of town. Now that I think of it, the summertime is the hardest time for me to adhere to a workout schedule because I tend to travel more on weekends and take more time away from home, which can make it tough to stick to a routine. The important thing is to make sure that you get some activity in, to make sure that your body is moving. Going off-routine sometimes can help you break through a plateau: it is, after all, the very definition of muscle confusion. As long as you're challenging your body, it all seems good to me.

I still love Chest and Back, no matter how many pushups I can do. I've really improved in my pushup abilities, probably because of the 30-15 workout, and I really look forward to crushing Chest and Back as a result. Today, however, I fell a bit short in Decline Pushups, managing only 25 each time, where I've been used to doing 30. The last 5 in each set were really tough, and ended with a minor collapse on the floor. I was surprised, because they're a distant cousin of the Pike Press, which I'm pretty good at, and, until today, had been competent in this move. Not to say that 25 is incompetent; I just had expectations of myself. Well, it makes for a challenge for next time.

Now, I'll have to find a way to get in an extra workout this week to make up for delaying Day 1. That should be interesting.