Rounding out the week

It's quiet in here this week. Are you guys going to pounce with weekly round-ups?! Overunder's back from Korea tonight; it might be a few days before he's back on his feet.

Meanwhile, on Friday, I did a little bit of bodyweight stuff.

Row 1000 m easy (4:50 min)

Overunder's barbell warm-up: 10 of each of deadlifts, hang cleans, cleans, squats, overhead squats, presses. (All with 45, except the OH squats, for which I used a broom handle and still couldn't get down all the way. I think there were supposed to be sumo deadlift high-pulls in there, but whatever; I was plenty warm.)

Bodyweight:
25 push-ups (from the knees)

25/leg Bulgarian squat (like a split squat, but with back leg up on a bench. Sort of a precursor to a pistol squat.)
5 pike presses
90 sec hands/feet plank
10 two-leg assisted pull-ups


Cool down with another easy 1000 m row.

Plus my 4 km walk to nursery school. :-)

Sprints while the weather holds

Nutshell: Jogged to the park, sprinted up a hill eight times, jogged home, lunged 60 times, stretched (a bit). Listened to jets fly overhead.

Details: Distance to the park is 1.2 km. Ran 13-15 second sprints (around 50 m), with 1:15 min rest in between, including walking back to the start of the sprint. About half the sprint (the middle half) was up a very steep hill.

The park was really busy today, so a couple of my rests were a little longer as I waited for meanderers to get off my hill. (I didn't want to startle anyone. What with my superhero tights and all.) I realized that the busy-ness was likely due to Remembrance Day. Our neighbourhood is full of government lackeys, who all have a holiday today. I'm guessing Overunder's commute was quicker than usual today? May bode well for being on time to wine club tonight!

Also, I'm going to write this down so I'm accountable: I have a car now. (As of Wednesday, Onge passed on the keys to the Green Chariot*.) But, I'm going to keep WALKING Tim to school as long as I can (ie: until the sidewalks are impassable with the stroller. He's still too little to walk that far. Or if it's frigid.) One-way-only exceptions allowed for days when I really need to get shit done at home -- like today, I picked him up so that I'd have time to listen to the Remembrance Day ceremonies on the radio.

* Green Chariot: A sporty 1998 Honda Civic. She's got power nothing, unless you count the powerfully rusting buckled ding on the trunk where Onge backed into a tree. Probably the one beside her own driveway.

Sprints and bodyweights

Only the second workout of the week (Tim was too snotty to send to school on Monday). So, I did my sprints and my "lifting heavy things" all in one go. The sprints were a little long, but not as long as a 400 m run. :-)  It looked like this:

Row 250 m in just < 1 min (1:55 min/500 m pace)
Rest 1 min
25/leg Bulgarian squats
Row 1/rest 1
5 pike position presses*
90 sec plank
Row 1/rest 1
25 push-ups (knees)
Row 1/rest 1
5 + 5 cheater pull-ups (two legs for support)

(In summary, that's 4 sprints and one round of five bodyweight exercise that theoretically hit the key functional areas.)

Cool down with 1000 m easy row.

* Start in a downward dog position and do a shoulder press til your head hits the floor (or thereabouts). This is about a half-dozen steps on the progression ladder from a handstand push-up.

Emma - if you guys are looking to increase your indoor workout possibilities, I recommend the Concept 2 rower (we are currently babysitting Daddy-o's). Once you get over your hatred of rowing, it's fabulous: versatile, compact, and easy on the joints.

And you thought squat tabatas were hard

The sprint tabata I did today was officially the hardest exercise I have ever done. (Run all out for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, repeat x8 in total.) Ten seconds have never passed so quickly and ineffectually.

The squat and push-up tabatas that I did before and after (respectively) the sprints felt like a walk in the park in comparison.


The numbers are my push-up reps. Squat reps were a fairly steady 19/set. The distance covered by "all out running" got shorter and shorter with every set.

Primal bodyweight

I've been reading Mark's Daily Apple lately. I'm not sure how gimmicky it is, but it sounds good to me so I've given way to my personal biases. So yesterday I did the "lift heavy things" portion of this approach. (My workout on Friday fell into the "sprint" category.

It means doing fairly high reps of the following five essential movements (x2): squats, push-ups, pull-ups, presses, and planks. (The type of each -- ie: wall squat vs. pistol squat; knee push-ups vs. one-handed push-ups; pike presses vs handstand push-ups, etc -- depends on what you can manage.)

Bookended with 1000 m easy-ish rows, I did two sets of:

25 proper push-ups (from the knees)
25/leg Bulgarian squat
10 two-leg assisted pull-ups (likely what Emma called "pseudo pull ups on low bar")
5 (barely) pike presses
90 sec hands/feet plank

Part of what makes me partial to this program is it's acknowledgement of the benefit of "move frequently at a slow pace", which to me is the same as "active lifestyle" (ie: walking 4 km a day just to get my kid to preschool and back, wearing 35 pounds on my back for two hours while walking around the market, etc.) which should be worth something when you can't pump iron all the time. Also, the approach to eating seems practical, rather than hardcore paleo.

Today my quads are pretty sore from those Bulgarian squats.