Day 19 – The 21 day habit

Legs and Back - 80 chinups, not bad for a fat old guy.

80 reps, not bad for a fat old guy.

Bring it he said. Do your best and forget the rest he said. What he neglected to say is that if you do bring it you may actually lose the ability to walk for short periods of time. He didn’t say “Do your best but be careful that you are still able to stand up after you are done”. By the way, he also didn’t mention how painful that stupid Crunchy Frog is on your lower back. I know it is not supposed to be, but as tight as your back gets after the workout it is almost impossible for it not to feel incredible pressure from doing CF’s or V-Snaps as they are similar to.

I did my Saturday double today which consists of an hour on the treadmill in the morning and then P90X in the evening. My legs were tired enough after the treadmill that I wanted to skip the legs and back workout. However, I am now under the 21 day habit influence given that I have taken 2 days off getting to 19 days. It is widely acknowledged by psychiatrists and so on that it takes 21 days to create a habit and now is that point where that influence is coming to bear. I actually felt like I was compelled to go to the basement and do the workout even though I wasn’t 100% convinced I wanted to. That is the beauty of habits, they automatically point you in the right direction even when you can’t convince yourself to go down that road.

Once I started I felt fine as I usually do. I was going lower in my squats and lunges, forcing my back leg straight which stretches my quad like a beast. The chinups are going OK, I am regularly doing 10 per set, mostly unassisted which on legs and back day comes out to 80 repetitions. My legs were aching after I finished and of course, the Ab Ripper tore my hip flexors apart. It was not a good abs session at all due to the heaviness in my quads but I struggled through at about 15-20 reps of the 25.

Day 12 – Injury prone?

Legs and Back.

The lobster made me do it!

Injuries are a fact of life in any athletic endeavour. I very rarely go to the gym without feeling some kind of pain somewhere. There is always something I am having to work around or be careful with and maybe only a few weeks in each year where I can really go full out in the gym without pain. As I get older, the injuries last longer, they refuse to heal at all without rest and of course once I stop to rest them, something else inevitably gets tweaked. Such has been the case with my elbow / shoulder. Since around August last year when I started lifting heavy at the gym again my shoulder has been problematic. For a while I was unable to bench at all due to the pain and since I was once again getting close to my personal best this was incredibly frustrating. Admitting that my personal best has already happened is a huge pill for me to swallow however setting new personal bests for flexibility and low body fat are where my focus should be. So my shoulder was a pain. Since starting P90X I have had less and less problems with it to the point now where there are days when I don’t feel it at all. However, I have a new issue. My elbows are sore on the inside. I know it is from close grip inwards facing pullups since I have never done them that way; I considered the inward facing grip to be somewhat of a cheat. The easy thing would be to skip that exercise and replace it with something else but my instinct tells me that I should be able to do this, maybe not now, but at some time my arms should be capable of doing the movement. Considering I have gone from maybe 2 or 3 chinup ability a few months ago to being able to do sets of ten I am very happy however the nagging issue of my elbow remains. I will admit that as my weight continues to fall, the chinups become increasingly easier, however I would like to be able to know that I am able to go into any workout, be it P90X or my regular weight training regime without the fear of pain. Maybe given the types of workout that I do, that is an unattainable dream. The intensity I bring to my workouts certainly doesn’t lend itself to a stress free and injury free life but I long for those days of my youth where the soreness went away after a day or two and things didn’t hurt just because you used them.

Maybe it was because I was sick last week and have been feeling under the weather for a few days or maybe it was the fact that I had already done 45 minutes on the treadmill this morning that I was dreading the legs and back workout for the day. So much so that I agreed to go out for an early dinner to The Keg at 4 in the afternoon in the hope that the meal would settle me into the right mindset. I am not sure if it was the lobster or the steak but once I got home I was determined to squeeze the day’s work in.

Legs and back is a tough day for me. I have had some bad experiences in the past with lunges causing my back to go out the following day so I am understandably wary of them. For the most part, today is all lunges of various types. Couple that with the pullups that are still challenging for me and you have a workout that I just don’t like. Sprinkle Ab Rippling X on top and you have an hour and a half of hell. My squats seem to be improving and my lunges, with the exception of my back leg aren’t bad at all. Getting that back leg to stay straight is a real problem though. There are only 4 types of pullups in the workout, 2 rounds of each. That means however that there are 8 rounds of 2 kinds of lunges / squats. I may be wrong but it doesn’t seem like they repeat the leg stuff. I wouldn’t know since I don’t have anywhere on the sheet to record the numbers or types even though Tony keeps telling us to write it all down ON THE SHEET! So imagine then 16 sets of legs, lets say half of them are repeated so you are looking at 12 different leg exercises of which I would bet half are lunges. I do remember that there is a wall sit which is then repeated as a single leg wall sit which I failed spectacularly at today. Do my legs feel stronger? Absolutely! Does my back feel like it is in danger of going out the following day? So far, not really. I will try to turn up the intensity slowly, gradually getting lower with my movements and hope that with time my back will get used to the work. Today my heart rate topped out at almost 150 which means I am still getting the workout I need. Also, where I was burning about 2000 calories a week at the gym (not including 10 hours of coaching) I am now up at around or slightly over 3000 for the week. That is an unexpected surprise!

Day 5 – Struggling

Weak, nauseous, vomiting? Could be P90X...
Weak, nauseous, vomiting? Could be P90X…

Legs and Back.

It’s a weird thing but I am more tired now after taking a day off than I was yesterday. Less sore, which is a good thing, but just exhausted. I am actually more scared of next week now that I know the movements I can increase my weights and of course my stupid male ego will force me to push myself even further. Today is Legs, Back and Ab Ripper X, a big day to say the least. Tomorrow is the last day of coaching for the year so hopefully even if I am too sore to walk I will still be able to say goodbye to my girls. I am heading home now to do the workout, eat some dinner and head out to a dance recital. I will hopefully get a chance to post before we go out, if not, once we return home. Damn, I was going to put up the rest of the gym mirrors tonight.

I haven’t felt this shaky since the expired meat episode when I had to take 2 days off work with what I thought was Botulism. Or Swine Flu. Turns out I just don’t know how to cook and I had given myself food poisoning.

The workout was fairly vicious. If I had managed to do 25 chin-ups each time I would have done 200!! However, since there are 4 types to do and you repeat them twice I managed only 80. Still, doing 80 mostly unassisted chin-ups is nothing to sneeze at when you are my weight. I did get some fairly significant pain in my left elbow whenever I did them with a supinated palm but it seems better this morning. However, I am sitting here at 5am after getting up at 4am to work on an upgrade to one of the computer systems at work and not being fully awake means I am also not fully aware of exactly how much pain I am going to be in today. My biggest worry is that historically when I have worked on my legs, it has tightened up my back and occasionally thrown it out. I will have to be careful today.

So the workout was back and legs with Ab Groper X. The leg workout was far more single leg work than I imagined it would be. It was also mostly lunge based. I suppose I had imagined it would be more traditionally squat based, however the variation, as with everything “X” was well thought out and difficult, but possible and challenging to execute. Less cardio intense than Plyometrics and less of a balance challenge than Yoga, it fit right in and allowed for some really good isolation of the quads. It was a little lacking in the hamstring department, but that is why you do so many lunge based movements, to increase the hamstring involvement. I managed to pull off most of the movements and was fairly close to the demonstrators reps however there are a couple of movements with which I really struggled. I am very fortunate never to have had knee problems, but I could see how this workout would be difficult if you did suffer from an old knee injury.

On the back end came Abs. My hip flexors are about as useful as a chocolate teapot right now. My Ab Ripper X workout seems to be getting worse not better. I am better at the first few exercises, but once we get to Fifer Scissors my flexors give in and my legs feel like pillars of stone. As for Crunchy Frog and his friends, frankly at this point they can all go to hell! I do feel stronger in my core, but I also feel a great deal of pain especially if I laugh. Thanks to Tony though, one of the first things I lost was my sense of humour so I am not worried.

later…