And the Beat Goes On

I did more Met-Con this evening. It's pretty tough to come up with something else when we really don't have much equipment. I worked in some strength work, though, with kettle-bell swings.

The workout was:
AMRAP in 10 Minutes
12 Kettle-bell Swings (25#)
Shuttle Runs
10 Sit-Ups

I managed to get almost 9 rounds completed. I only needed 8 more sit-ups and a short trot back to the start line.

I scaled the workout for others, though. They used less weight and fewer reps for the kettle-bell swings. Of course, everyone still seemed to get a good workout. It's all about high "relative" intensity.

Right Back at It

I had a pretty good workout this morning. The work out I had planned included mostly met con work, with some weighted movements. As usual, I felt a little sleepy. Right up until I did the warm up.

For the workout, I did:

7 Rounds of:
10 Kettlebell Swings (25#)
Shuttle Run
10 Decline Push Ups

We then worked on double unders for a bit. I think all the jump rope work I've done so far has really made a difference. My single unders are getting better, I'm able to do crossovers pretty easily and able to do alternating double unders for awhile. I just need to keep working on it.

I ended up skipping my Karate class, though. I didn't drive to work and stayed in during the evening to hang with the family. It made things pretty restful, actually. It's surprising how much energy I have when I only work out once during the day.

A Long Day and a Rest Day

Saturday was a good day, although it was fairly long. Exercise wise, I did quite a bit, but at a low intensity pretty much all day. It started with almost 2 hours of martial arts. We worked mostly on push hands for the class.

I like push hands. It's a way to work on combat skills without the possible injuries of hard style sparring. I'm usually pretty good at it, too. We did several skill building exercises and  worked up to more freestyle push hands. I finished out the martial arts portion of the day with some push hands form work. Not exactly my finest hour, but I'm getting there.

After martial arts, I did an extra short Crossfit workout. I did 10-7-5 of reverse rows and dips, all on the rings. The work was pretty tough. I definitely need to work on my dips, though. I had a hard time with the dips, but managed to get through it.

Finally, I went on a bike ride for a date. The ride lasted a little over an hour, which was fine with me. I felt pretty good on the ride, although I need to get my "butt" callouses back.

On Sunday, I did normal rest-day activities. This included watching movies, walking the dogs and basically taking it easy. I made sure to stretch a bit, though to keep from being stiff and sore. I'll be all ready for Monday morning's workout.

Realizations on Rest Days

For some reason, I felt tight, tired and sluggish most of the day yesterday. I was even a little sore from Wednesday's morning workout. This might be because I didn't do ANYTHING yesterday. No stretching, no morning warm up, no Cuong Nhu stances or katas; nothing. I think I need to change that for my next rest day. I probably need to at least do my normal warm up.

This morning, I rolled out of bed and did a weight workout. Funny thing, I'm used to working out in the the pitch black of early morning. Well today, the sun actually started to peek over the horizon and light the area. This meant I could actually see while lifting. A nice bonus.

After a good warm up and the Burgener Warm Up (which is getting easier with the full olympic bar, by the way), I did 3x5 of Front Squat, Press and Power Cleans. Because I still do not have a rack, I have to clean everything from the ground to start. Of course, it helps develop my clean, but I feel it cheats something from the front squats and keeps me from doing heavy back squats.

I felt pretty strong in my exercises. I made sure to work on active shoulders during the press and keeping my elbows high during the front squat. On the power cleans, I kept thinking about getting lower, getting under the weight. Although I didn't go into a full squat clean, I did want to focus on good technique.

My weights for the exercise sets are below:

Front Squat 95, 115, 125
Press 75, 85, 90
Power Cleans 75, 85, 105

Now, next time I do the exercises, I need to increase my weights.

On a totally unrelated subject, I think I've come up with a solution for the chin up bar at the dojo. Right now, we don't have any permanent bar. I've brought my rings in a couple of times, but I want some way to do real pull ups.

Jon from AgainFaster.com offers a cool pull up bar that can hang from the middle support beam in the dojo. The cool thing about the bar is we can take it down when the fitness classes are not in session. I can see getting 3-4 bars and placing them along the beam as needed. The challenge is, they are $100 each. I better start saving.

Morning Weight Workout

Today, I tried something a little different for the workout. We have dumbbells at the Dojo, so it's a pretty easy matter now to work in lighter weight workouts. So, this morning's WOD was a weighted workout. Between my medicine ball and the dumbbells, I think I came up with something interesting.

Today's WOD is:

21-15-9 of

'Kettlebell' Swings (#25)
Ball Slams

The workout was a good one, short but sweet. I finished up in 6:24. I wanted something short so I could focus on double unders for the movement part of the class.

Take a look at this demonstration of Double Unders and jump rope technique.



Jumping rope takes quite a bit of coordination, agility and aerobic conditioning. Today during class, I managed to get 11 alternating double unders with single unders. The goal is to string together as many double unders as I can in 2 minutes. We'll see how well I can do by the end of the month.

More Met-Con Workouts

Tonight was a good night at Unity Martial Arts. We have a "Focus Class" on Tuesday evenings, where we work on material outside of 'normal' belt progression material. Tonight we worked on sparring. Sparring in itself can be a tough workout. Sensei Tanner made it a little harder by having us concentrate on kicks. This meant we wore out our legs during the sparring exercises.

For our workout, I concentrated on metabolic conditioning again. Our WOD was:

As Many Rounds As Possible In 7 Minutes of:
Shuttle Runs
10 Burpees

I only managed to finish 5 Rounds and a shuttle run before the 7 minutes was up. My legs were burning, especially during the burpees. I almost used the shuttle runs as recovery efforts for the burpees.

A Jump Rope, a Stop Watch and Some Intensity

For today's workout, the stuff in the title is all we needed, and we really didn't need the jump rope. I usually include some jump rope in the warm up, simply because it's so universal in what it covers. Coordination, aerobic capacity, plyometric movement; all of this stuff is included in the basic jump rope. Add in some cross-overs and double-unders and you're set.

After the warm up, we did today's equipment free WOD :

For Time:
15 Squats, Push Ups, Sit Ups
20 Squats, Push Ups, Sit Ups
25 Squats, Push Ups, Sit Ups
30 Squats, Push Ups, Sit Ups

I managed to finish in about 13:38. The workout started off seemingly too easy. However, the final exercises were much slower. I ended up having to break up the final exercises into groups and 10 and, sometimes, 5.

Wow. It should be interesting to see the improvement when we do this workout again.