Legs and Back.
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!