Ceejbot

Thoracic mobility work using tennis balls and a foam roller thingie. Wow, this one was a shocker.

Rack pulls: new personal best of 305#. The weak point was my grip; the rest of the posterior chain felt okay! Perhaps I’ll be able to blow away that 255# 1RM on the deadlift soon.

Front squats in a wave pattern: new theoretical 1RM is just over 135#, given how I did with the sets. My form on this exercise improves every time I do it.

Seven exercises, 100 reps of each. I have done this once before. Same seven exercises, same weights, faster run through them all. Hardest was, once again, the bicep curl, but it wasn’t hard in objective terms. Easiest were the leg exercises, which will need to have their weights bumped up next time.

I finished the day with some cardio: 45 secs on, 15 secs off running at 6mph, for 3 minutes. 1 min of straight kettlebell swings at 16kg, rest, repeat. I really need to do something about how horrible my cardiovascular fitness is.

Yesterday: Heaving snatch balance with the junior Olympic bar plus 20#, just enough weight to make the exercise feel real. Tricep pullovers, squats on a bosu ball, lunges with one foot on a puffy thingie that made it a balance exercise as well, a bunch of other small things with dumbbells, barbell rows.

Tomorrow I’m probably going to do the Dirty Thirty again and see if I’ve improved any. 22 minutes to beat.

I went gym climbing twice over the weekend. I can do 5.7s without much trouble, usually, though I’ll fail at the very end of my session or if the climb requires some technique I’m poor with. I can make some 5.8s. My knees are all banged up from climbing, which is what happens when I start climbing at the edge of what I can do. Bruises, scrapes, and calluses!

Two 25-pound bumper plates, one in each hand. 30 seconds on, 30 seconds rest. Repeat for one set. Then do it again for another set. Two minutes of standing around holding fifty pounds up with finger strength only. Wild.

Pushups against a bar in the squat cage, from very low to the ground all the way up. To failure on each bar position. My sticking point is 4 inches up from the chest-to-bar starting point.

Single-arm dumbbell hang power cleans. 25# dumbbell. The point was to use enough hip drive that the weight just floats up. Also, improve shoulder mobility. My form is slowly improving, but I have to use heavy-enough weights that I can’t cheat and use upper-body strength.

Step-ups onto a high plyometrics stool with bumper plates stacked on top to make it higher. Hip mobility & drive from that high stretched-out position.

Medicine ball slams, with a completely non-bouncy gel-filled ball. Focus on explosive power generation. This is one of the exercises that is making me hurt today, this and the pushups.

Today’s workout: weird range-of-motion pulls and presses, aimed at raw strength increases at the extremes of the motions.

For instance, bodyweight rows, from full arm extension to halfway up, on a very low bar that meant I was pulling up most of my body weight. These were paired with band-assisted pull-ups from the middle of the range of motion all the way up to the chest-to-bar top. Bench press starting low and going halfway up, paired with inclined press with band resistance to make the top part of the press hardest.

Final exercise: front squats. My squatting has improved so much in the last couple of months it’s hard to believe. What needs work now is some upper body flexibility. Wrist flexibility. My trainer showed me a wrist stretch exercise: place your palms flat on a bench and just rock forward. He gets past 90° easily. I can’t even get there before whatever the heck is tight inside there refuses to move. Is that 30 years of typing on computer keyboards showing itself? I’m not sure, but I definitely need to work on it.

Today’s post-workout shake: 1 cup unsweetened almond milk, 1 fresh kiwi, a scoop of soy protein powder, and some ice. I bought a Kitchen-Aid immersion blender that’s allowing me to get a little wilder about what I put in these things.

I ordered some whey protein and some organic flaxseed in bulk. I was persuaded by what I read about the differences between whey and soy proteins. Next up is finding a good source of grass-fed beef. Yeah, I really am tinkering with how, when, and what I eat in a big way. Time to take the weight loss over the top, I say.

My trainer attempted to kill me today. The goal of the day was endurance: 50 reps of each of 10 exercises for a total of 500. Also, death. (Cake was not offered as an option.) The agenda:

prisoner squats
forward-backward lunges
situps
kneeling pushups - starting and ending with chest on the floor
Turkish get-ups, 8kg kettle bell
some kind of hopping exercise: 1 big hop forward, two little ones back

… and four more exercises I didn’t get to, because the Turkish get-ups took way longer than projected. They slaughtered me, in fact. I did 5 per arm before swapping, and toward the end I’d do two then lie on the floor breathing. My legs and torso were not the limiting factors. It was shoulder strength and cardio. My left arm in particular had a hard time keeping the bell in the air after a while.

Around the 35-rep mark I lay on the floor dripping sweat and pondering the pros and cons of expiring right then and there. Con: a lot of paperwork for the survivors, nobody to prevent my husband from slaughtering the cat the next time she leaves a dead rat in his shoe. Pro: wouldn’t have to do 15 more get-ups.

I was so dead at the end of this workout that my conversation stopped making sense.

300 reps total. Sigh. The situps and squats were easy. The lunges were done 25 on the left leg, then 25 on the right, and I had to stop midway on each to let the pump subside. The pushups were to the point of muscle failure and past. I did them in sets of 5 toward the end, and the last pushup was really questionable. They weren’t lame-ass pushups, though: full range of motion, body solid. Kneeling, yes, but it’s progress.

I’m now drinking one of those coconut milk post-workout shakes for its intended purpose: a little bit of carb replacement following a workout, plus some increased protein for the day. And I will say this about that: I need to get an immersion blender for this purpose. The fresh strawberries are awesome in the shake, but they needed to have been blended, not just mixed in. Food makes it all better. I feel human again.

I bought some unsweetened almond milk to try in the shakes after I use up the can of coconut milk. I figure it’ll be a change of pace.

Yesterday I did rack pulls for the first time. Rack pulls are the top part of the deadlift. I did them to improve my grip strength and to get some experience with holding very heavy weights successfully. We started at 135# and worked up to 285#. Once we’d found a weight where I could do 3 reps but not much more, I stayed there for sets of 3, super-setted with a calf exercise designed to improve my bounce for rope-jumping. (Bouncing on the calf raise machine with 90#s on it, basically. The weight feels heavy if you raise it slowly, but if you go fast it gets easy.)

The other thing I worked on was pushups. The simple pushup has been beyond me since the beginning. One thing that’s become clear to me is that I have never done a proper pushup in my life. Not once. Even when I was a thin kid. I’ve never known how to do a pushup. I put my hands in the wrong place. I push the wrong way. So Trainer Jeff is starting from scratch with me and making me do movements that will retrain the brain properly. Yesterday, this meant 3 reps each on successively lower positions on the Smith machine bar, hands at the right spot relative to my chest, starting at the bar and pushing up. The other day I did band-assisted pushups immediately after bench-pressing my 1-rep max, again with focus on pushing the right way.

I still can’t do a single proper rep from the floor, but I think I’ll get there this way. The other thing I can do is do better at the other end. How about if I have to push less weight?

My weight is bouncing around in a 5-lb range right now. The low part of the range is the lowest I’ve been since I started this. The high part is where I’ve been plateaued for the last couple of months. Meanwhile, my body is smaller than it was (jeans getting baggy, t-shirts all too big, next size down jeans now fit in the “can be buttoned up” sense). My plan is to pounce on this shift and make it stick by engaging in some very mild caloric restriction, while continuing to eat low-carb. I’ll just eat less of the same stuff. I hope I’ll keep the muscle gains and shed a little more fat.

My food habits have changed radically in the last month. The protein powder + fruit juice + yogurt shakes are gone: too much sugar. I now scramble two eggs every morning, along with some of whatever is leftover from dinner last night. Lunch is salad with avocado and dressing I make myself. Dinner is sloppier, but mostly it’s some kind of meat stir-fried with some assortment of veggies. I have a bunch of bok choy to cook tonight, for instance; need to defrost something to throw into the wok with it. Though I have plenty of leftovers to eat if I get lazy.

No more restaurant food unless I feel like it, in other words. I never feel pushed into it by lack of time. There’s always something to eat in the fridge, something sensible to eat.

I’ve changed what I eat. Now I change how much, and see what happens.

Today’s theme was slightly intense cardio intervals paired with much mellower single-muscle exercises. I did 3 sets of each of these pairs:

2 min jogging (fastest pace 6mph)
12 dips, bodyweight offset by foot placement

2 min stair mill at level 8 (moderately fast)
20 backward lunges, alternating legs

20 rows on a machine set to 60lbs
500m rowing at a pace faster than 2:30

Rowing is one of those intense exercises that really pays off the time you spend on it. Running is just your legs. Rowing is your whole body: legs, arms, back, shoulders, core. I concentrated on my form on the third round, because I was blown out and tired and not sure I could make the 2:30 pace. So I did not look at the timer at all and just made myself do strong leg-based pulls with clean returns. Surprised myself by finishing in less time than the 2nd round had taken. Good form proves its worth once more.

I finished with a plank hold with hip extensions. Only instead of what the guy does in that video, I did 10 extensions with each leg then 5 with each leg. Rest briefly, repeat for 3 rounds.

My head cold has receded to random coughs, and so today I’m back to the fitness game.

Today’s theme was twenty-ones: do 7 reps at the bottom range of motion, 7 at the top, 7 at full range of motion. The point is to concentrate on improving total range of motion. Exercises I did this with: TRX chest press, TRX rows, leg extension machine, hamstring curl machine. Also, I did TRX squats with a bit of a twist: all at the lowest range of motion (full squat to half), 5 with feet in a narrow position, 5 a little wider, 5 at sumo width, 5 in the middle, 5 again narrow. 3 sets of each.

I also worked on power cleans some more, this time with dumbbells so I could get the motion right without being limited by wrist flexibility. I did a set of power cleans with 20# dumbbells and then a set of front squats with a pair of 25-pounders resting on my shoulders. I am finally starting to get the power clean explosion movement. Doing it with dumbbells was a good switch.

I rehearsed overhead squats for Crossfit Nancy. This workout is 5 rounds for time of a 400m run followed by 15 overhead squats @ 95# (men) or 65# (women). I’ll be doing it at 45#, so that’s what I did the squats at today. Oh yes, the squat. Is there any single exercise better than the squat? If there is, I want to be doing that one too.

I concluded with 700 meters of rowing, and then a bunch of rope jumping. I am finally learning to do double-unders and chain them together. All in all, not a bad workout day. I’d been worried that I’d be under the weather. Instead I feel better after it than I did going in. Sweat is good for you.

Today: more work on power cleans, high-intensity cardio, figure eights with a 12kg kettlebell (30 reps per set), and get-ups. I continue to make progress on the wrist flexibility required for the cleans, as well as with the explosive movement phase. I did a bunch at 65# and some more at 95#. I wouldn’t call them good power cleans, just better ones than before.

I did the best Turkish get-ups I have ever done at 8kg, 12kg, and 16kg. This was my first time even attempting it at 16kg, and I was surprised by how smoothly it went. They weren’t easy but I wasn’t struggling either. Some time in the past few months, some exercise that I did worked its magic on my body, and boom! I have jumped up a level. Even left-handed I’m doing them smoothly.

I was ungodly sore all weekend. Specifically, hamstrings, biceps, and triceps. So sore that movement was unwelcome, that even stretching was unpleasant. I was so sore that I skipped my cardio. I just didn’t want to move. I know, I know, I’ll never get anywhere lazing out like that.

I’ll probably overdo it today out of guilt.

It’s sunny again. O trickle charger, it is time for you to be put away until next winter! This means the Lotus is heading into the shop for its (slightly belated) 7500 mile service. This weekend I hope to drive it down to LA. Well, I’m driving to LA regardless, and I simply hope to be driving the fun car instead of the stodgy one. Here’s an inspirational thought: the Lotus seats are way more comfortable now that I’m so much smaller.

Centuries! That means 100 reps with as little rest as possible.

leg press @ 80#
bench press @ 30#
hamstring curls @ 40-ish? I forget
bicep curls, cable machine @ 20#
leg extension @ 40#
tricep extension, cable machine @ 20#
bodyweight inclined row

40 minutes.

This is an endurance workout. Mostly I managed 50 reps of each of these before needing to rest to let the lactic acid get flushed out. In other words, to let the burning pain subside a little. Easiest: leg press. Hardest: bicep curl.

To start off I rehearsed thrusters @ 65#. I had some difficulty with them. That weight is heavy enough that I struggle to maintain balance and control the bar when it’s over my head. This distracts me from doing a proper squat-and-thrust-up to propel the weight upward. I did 20 reps and worked for each one. Crossfit Fran is going to be a doozy next time I do it, because I’m doing the thrusters as specced next time. 45 reps at 65 pounds. Yow.