Up and Down

This week has so far been a bit of a bust.  I started getting sick on Monday and unfortunately slept through Karate times because of the headache I had.  This disappointed me because I know that I will be missing Saturday’s class.

Tuesday was of course pancake day, or Shrove Tuesday.  So I invited my pal Damion over and we had chocolate chip, peanut butter pancakes.  We even threw a few marshmallows  into some but they were a bit of a bust.  So that day was good.

Wednesday I was driving to work, got about a hundred yards from my house, tried to avoid a parked car and my car did not respond to my turned wheels due to ice.  Smash. Not the best way to start the day, also by the end of the day I had no voice.  Due to all the running around after work with cars and rentals and accident reporting and the fact that I could not talk I missed Karate again! Boo!

Yesterday, I woke up with gummy eyes and still no voice, but otherwise feeling alright.  I went to work without hitting anything had a good day and came home early and slept for an hour.  I also had a session with Jodi planned and I was not going to miss that because she is so busy now it is had to get one, and after having missed two nights of Karate I needed to do something.  So I went.  I could not speak and my breathing was pretty ragged but she had three new programs for me and I was excited.

As I mentioned in a comment over at Affection For Fitness, I love getting new things to do at the gym. Jodi labeled each of these things as challenges because she knows me all too well.  We ran through a shortened version of all three programs in the hour we had.  The first program is four sets of four exercises, I do each exercise for tenreps and do as many rounds of the four things as I can do in eight minutes!  For example set one was BOSU crunchies, BOSU squat jumps, BOSU burpees and then BOSU push-ups, each for ten and then as many or the group as I can get done.  We did three minutes yesterday just so we could get to all three programs.  I like this program because I’m constantly changing what I am doing, makes the time go by faster.  There might be one thing I do not like but I only have ten reps of it at a time so it is not a big deal.

The second program is very different and I guess something she just learned about a few weeks ago.  It features squats, bench press and pull-ups and that is it and at about 60% of the maximum weight I can lift. So the squats start off by doing just one in the first minute, then two in the second minute then three and so on.  At first it is dreadfully easy, but by the time I got to minute twelve I was done.  In all it was 78 squats (and after I has just run through fifteen minutes of the program I was just talking about which had a lot of leg stuff in it.

Then the bench press again at 60% but this time it is three reps every ten seconds and the resting position is just having the bar up. Jodi said when she did this she got done 8 rounds and so I said I was going to do 9 just to show her up.  But I only made it through 7 (again we had just done that first program) I accused her of planning this out so that I would not beat her scores.

Then it was pull-ups Tabada style so twenty seconds on, ten seconds off for four minutes!  I think I asked her why she hated me when she said we were doing this, but we did it anyways.  It is using the assisted pull-up machine so for the first half of the four minutes it is not so bad, and I’m allowed to adjust the weight so that I can always get some done, but by the end my forearms especially were killing me!  I can’t even describe the pain, I could not even clench my hands because that makes you flex your forearm to do and that hurt way too much.

Typically for this day I’d do the squats just once, but the bench press and the pull-ups at least twice, but in the interest of time we moved on to twelve minute abs (plus 4).  Jodi had written out twelve different ab exercises like crunchies, oblique crunchies, alternated toe touch, plank, roman twist, bicycle crunchies etc… that each had to be done for one minute, then I was to finish off with a four minute tabada crunchie.  We did all that except the tabada part due to time and her having to meet her next client.

Suffice to say at the end off all this I was done.  I felt pretty good, but my body was totally out of gas.  I was glad I made it to the gym though and got some new programs to be excited about!

Today Amber and I are headed for Toronto.  I took the day off work a few weeks ago and despite the fact that I am still very snotty and have no voice, (she just woke up feeling a bit under the weather too) we are going to go and have some fun.  The science center has a Da Vinci exhibit on that should be cool, and of course we’ll go to Sliver Snail and then maybe the Zoo or something tomorrow. we will see.

All in all I think this week so far has been a bit of a wash, some great, some horrid, but this weekend should be very nice!