Sounds bizarre that rest week would start with the longest and most challenging workout of all but rest simply means no weights. Today is Yoga X and I am hoping for an improvement in my performance after such a hard week last week. The downside to skipping the rest / stretch day is that I am now working on 10 days straight and I won’t be able to take a day off until Sunday. I think at that point I may stretch a little but try to take the day completely off to recuperate before phase 2 starts.
I have to admit I am pretty proud of myself. The end of phase 1 is in sight and I am still fully committed to the process. Having said that, I still have 68 days to go which at this point seems like forever. In fact, when I complete the 90 days it will be (if my math is correct) September 19th which is after coaching starts. I hadn’t figured it out until now so let’s assume that I have to take Tuesday and Thursday off during coaching season. That means that from Sept 8th most likely I will lose 2 days a week. Luckily I will be on day 78 on Labour Day so this will only affect me for a couple of weeks. Potentially then, my finish date will move from Saturday September 19th to Friday September 25th. That all depends on nothing else getting in the way, including not being away at all or, if away, being able to do the workout anyway. That will be a challenge since we have a weekend in Penetang and at least one wedding to go to between now and then.
One step at a time though, it’s my first exposure to rest week including something they call Core Synergistics which makes my abs hurt just thinking about it. I want to get the workout done as soon as I get home tonight because I didn’t watch Big Brother last night and I don’t want to fall behind!
So yoga went OK, I found it was dragging for a while around the 30 minute mark and I actually ended up skipping a couple of the twist positions because I had a tightness in my back. The session was OK and it didn’t aggravate it but once I finished I could tell that I had slightly overstretched it. Hopefully with this being rest week it will give me a chance to rest it and heal a little. My back is cracking all the way along now after the workout, I should probably have gone on my inversion table after I finished. So I am a little stiff but it’s probably nothing to be concerned about. Just for future reference it is my left side, lower back from the bottom of my ribcage all the way down to the top of my hip bone. It was probably strained as I went into Warrior 1 from runners pose. It stiffens up and makes it impossible for me to stand up quickly, however once I walk for a few seconds it loosens up just fine.
Well, I woke up just as sick as I went to bed. I thought that maybe if I walked around a while I would feel better but after having staggered to the bathroom I figured I had better get back to the heating pad before I hurt myself. My back is a fickle thing, you would think that a day off my feet would be a welcom relief, that my back would thank me with at the very least a pain free day but NO… a few hours off my feet and I can be debilitated for days on end while my spine attempts to realign itself. After an hour on the heating pad it was time to try again, and I was fully aware that with my coworker off today that I had to get to work somehow so I made a valiant attempt and convinced myself that as I moved more and more I would loosen up. Turns out I was right… I am sitting here at the end of the day almost completely recovered from my stomach upset (although let it be said that my stomach is still tender and cramping) and able to walk mostly upright with only a small degree of pain over and above the usual. However, I am not sure it would be wise to attempt yoga X today. In fact, I am not sure it would be wise to attempt any kind of X today at all unless I want to end up with herniated disc X, barf on the basement floor X or oops I snapped my neck falling out of the crane pose X!
I guess we will see, I may nap for a few minutes now and see how I feel after that. In the grand scheme of things, an extra day isn’t the end of the world.
Unfortunately I spent my whole Canada Day in bed with what I can only describe as the stomach flu. The cramping was incredibly painful at times and I felt dizzy and disoriented. The worst thing is not the sickness but knowing that a day in bed means my back is going to be incredibly sore tomorrow and I will probably not be able to do Yoga then either! That means I will have had 2 days off and most likely will have a sore back for a week.
My diet consisted of a handful of shreddies, a pitifully small amount of oatmeal and a banana. Oh, and a shake. All prepared by my wonderful wife as I lay upstairs in bed.
Being sick sucks. Being sick and knowing that you have a few days of excruciating back pain to look forward to is monumentally worse.
I hope everyone else’s Canada Day was better than mine!
Last day of coaching! WOOHOO!!! A couple of months off to ourselves this should be great!
However, this means no workout tonight which may be a good thing since after yesterday’s Legs and Back (with Ab Killer) both Nicole and I are very sore below the waist. As exciting as that sounds, don’t get all giggly, the fact is that I have had the following conversation several times today:
Why are you limping?
My butt hurts
Why?
I did P90X legs last night
Is that the infomercial one?
Unfortunately, yes.
Why would you do that to yourself?
Honestly? I am starting to wonder…
Just as day 2 taught me, as the day wears on you do not feel better… In fact you get a quite significant increase in pain towards the end of the day. I am expecting that when I stand up to leave  today my butt may very well catch on fire.
I think this would be a good time to demonstrate what my back surgery did to my legs. The only picture I have of my legs prior to the surgery is below. I will take a picture of my legs as they are now today if possible. The upshot of the surgery was that once I was recovered, I had lost approximately 50% of my strength in my right leg. The size difference at the time was shocking, I had lost about 30% of the mass from my quad and I looked just plain bizarre. I can’t even think of an analogy for it, it was just weird. After what is now 8 years of rehab and constant work on the leg, I still have issues with it. I can’t run up steep hills for example, after a few steps my leg gives out. The other really messed up thing with it is that my body has compensated my giving me a strong butt muscle which makes it feel like I am sitting on an enourmous wallet in my back pocket. Anyway, it’s been 8 years now and I haven’t had a single picture taken where you can see my legs. I think it is about time.
By the way, my back injury was caused by a collapsing rugby scrum which I was caught under as a 14 year old. It resurfaced in the gym when I tried to do too much weight on the incline leg press and the stack came down on me. The motto of my story is do what you can, not what your ego tells you to do.
Since I am still coaching, at least for this week, I have no choice but to take today off. Even if I wanted to work out after I get home it would mean starting at 9:30 or so, going until 10:30 and then probably not being able to sleep until midnight. Actually it doesn’t sound so bad when I think about it.
Speaking of thinking, I have a feeling I will change how I feel about this experience on a daily basis. I know when Tony and I are alone and I dream about ripping his legs off one by one I feel a lot different than I do once it is high five time and we pack it in for the day. However I also find that I feel different day to day. I have an undercurrent of feeling that I am simply not doing enough. I guess it is because of the nature of lifting weights and the obvious result that I feel like I am underachieving at the moment. I know that when I go to the gym I have a set amount of sets and reps to do and that once I am done I will have achieved my 70,000lbs or whatever that days requirement is. I also know that I will be predictably tired and equally predictably sore. With P90X so far I don’t have that kind of predictability. Some of the things I can do easily but others I am not so proficient with and as such I don’t get the kind of work I would like from it. I have to assume that as I become more familiar I will be able to get full benefit from knowing how to do the skills and how to measure my effort. For now, I remain uncomfortable in my frustration.
That said, the program seems like a well thought out and well put together system. I know that when I plan the conditioning for myself or for the kids during the fall it is with meticulous attention to getting the right work done in the right way and making sure that one workout recovery doesn’t affect the next workout execution. This is a difficult thing to achieve and one which I believe I have never seen in an at home system. That is why I decided to try this as opposed to any other home based system. I was looking for a change of pace from the weights at the gym but wanted something I could trust to give me the kind of challenge I was looking for. I believe, regardless of my previous statment of frustration, that I have found that program. So far, and I know after 4 of the 90 days I am no expert here, I would highly recommend this to anyone.
The real pain in the ass about today and Thursday is that I have no rec class to teach so I have until 6pm to get to Gymnastics. That would give me enough time to do my workout if I was close to home… or if I had remembered to bring a DVD with me. Maybe I can improvise something…
Happy Canada Day!
