Christmas brings eternal temptation to all of us.  Piles of chocolate everywhere, booze, ridiculous amounts of food and a genetic tendency to not do very much and stay where it’s warm.

I’m as guilty as anyone around the festive period.  Working in a school means even more chocolate.  Damn stuff is everywhere.  IN bowls in the staffroom, being given children, being given to teachers by children…. perhaps next year I should go primal, and give everyone bacon instead?  That would be an interesting experiment!

In an effort to try and stay roughly the same shape over the festive period, I’m on a bit of an early morning mission.  If I get the exercise and the work in quickly, I can spend the rest of the day indulging in sloth (though maybe not the chocolate) and not feel guilty about it.

Crashed through kettlebell legs again, but added 5 to every set of reps, and replaced the get ups with hi-pulls.  Found the whole process tiring  but slightly dull.  I miss having ready access to a set of ropes at school, and outside is a bit of a deathtrap right now.  I’m hoping to acquire some vibrams for Christmas.  It will be interesting to see how they cope with ice and snow.

Merry Christmas!

As promised yesterday here’s the supersets I was talking about.

Chest 3 sets of each exercise, with 60 seconds rest between each one.

• 12 dumbbell chest presses/20 press ups
• 12 incline dumbbell presses/20 incline press ups
• 15 dumbbell flys/5 roll away press ups (hold a dumbbell in each hand, and assume the press up position.  Lower your body towards the ground by moving your hands apart, then return).
• 12 lateral raises

Stomach

1. 3 x 15 hanging leg lifts
2. 3 x 15 alternate knee to elbow crunches
3. 3 x 15 weighted crunch (I used a 20kg kettlebell)

Arms

• 3 x 10 skull crushers (used a 20kg kettlebell)
• 3 x 12 tricep press ups

To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with this.  The main problem I had was that although my arms were reduced to wet rubber, the rest of me was fairly unscathed.  This lacks anything in terms of compound exercises, which are far more effective in building muscle size and power.

Still, one learns from the experience.  The roll away press ups were a nightmare in terms of technique, particularly as my arms were already shredded.  I’m thinking that might be an interesting addition to the kettlebell workouts.  It’s also been interesting to see that my thought processes around exercise.  A few months ago I would have thought this was a god workout.  Now I’m disappointed it wasn’t harder.  Now that’s progress.

Back to the grind .  In a flash of inspiration, I remembered that my school has ropes hanging from the ceiling.  Due to the Health and Safety gremlins (the same ones that won’t let me blow anything up), I’m not allowed to turn my class into a collection of Rhesus monkeys.  It’s a shame, as it’s something I think they would enjoy being.  On the other hand, I can go up them if I want to.

I ended up doing three circuits of the following.  I’d forgotten just how tiring ropes can be.  I’m doing those again.

1. 5 rope climbs (rope is ~20 feet)
2. 10 squat jumps
3. 20 tricep press ups
4. 3 widths of the hall, bounding
5. 90 second plank
6. 45 second side plank
7. 20 medicine ball twists (3kg ball)
8. 10 medicine ball slams
9. 20 tricep dips

I’m going to keep that one for working out at school.  Best benefit?  I can use the school hall PA to play some decent tunes.  Yeah!

Took a day rest after that little effort, and just did the kettlebell legs routine I’ve posted about before.  Found it a lot easier this time round.  My body is obviously beginning to remember the stresses I put it under.

Tomorrow is an interesting bunch of supersets I found in a magazine.  As it’s something a bit different, I’ll give it a whirl, see how it goes.  Then I’ll let you know.

The previous week of hard graft produced positive results.

This week, of work related idleness and generally not getting my shit together, produced lethargy and sloth.

A lesson there, methinks.

Sometimes there isn’t enough space to exercise.  Wrong.

I’ll agree the weather can be horrible, or you just don’t feel like going out, but there’s always space to exercise.  So here’s my one size fits all set of indoor exercises.  Perform ten reps of each in a circuit.  Either set a number of circuits, or a time limit.  Before starting, warm up by jogging on the spot and performing some dynamic stretching exercises.

Squat jumps

Squat down with your hands behind your head, thighs parallel to the floor.  Launch yourself as high into the air as you can.  I’m still trying to headbutt the ceiling.  Land in your starting position, then jump again.  Make sure your thighs are parallel before each jump.

Russian lunges

Go into the standard lunge position, right foot forward, left foot back, left knee almost touching the floor.  Make sure the right knee doesn’t go over the toes.  Jump as high as you can and switch the position of your feet.  Repeat.  That’s one rep.

Side bounds

Simply hop from right foot to left foot, covering a distance approximately two and a half shoulder widths with each hop.

Hip Extensions

Lie on your back, feet flat on the floor, knees bent.  Arms by your sides, palms flat.  Using your quads and glutes, push your hips upwards until only your shoulders are on the floor.  To increase the difficulty, do this with one leg at a time, the other leg held out in front of you.

Pogo jumps

Jump up and down on the spot.  You should be using your calf muscles and toes for this exercise, not your upper legs.

If you have a reasonable amount of space, you can also try bounding, but that depends entirely on the amount of furniture you have to deal with.

Disclaimer: if this really upsets the people on the floor below you, it’s not my fault.  Buy new neighbours!

Did my normal kettlebell workout again.  Finished with shaking arms and legs, I think mainly because I took shorter rests between exercises.  Although it felt harder, that felt better.  So progress.  What I want to avoid is things becoming habitual, as that way I cut corners.  So I think the next time I do the workout I shall have to redesign it.  Muscles may not care how they are challenged, just about the weight and the time, but the brain gets bored.  Half of the battle with this exercise lark is staying focused and actually exercising regularly.  Changing the workouts helps achieve that.

Variation on the kettlebell today, trying to shift the focus to something slightly more leg orientated.

• kettlebell swing 20 reps
• prisoner squat 10 reps
• Russian lunges 5/leg
• Squat thrusts 10 reps
• prisoner squat 10 reps
• mountain climers 10/leg
• prisoner squats 20 10 reps
• kettlebell rack squat 30 reps
• prisoner squats 10 reps
• cross leg sits 25
• prisoner squats 10 reps
• one leg squats 5/leg
• prisoner squat 5 reps
• leg flicks 50
• prisoner squat 5 reps
• kettlebell clean and jerk 10 reps each side
• prisoner squat 5 reps
• spider man press ups 5 side
• kettlebell Romanian Deadlift 25 reps
• spider man press ups 5 side
• kettlebell swing 25 reps
• single arm row 10 reps/side
• kettlebell swing 25 reps
• single arm row 10 reps/side
• kettlebell clean 10 reps per side
• half get ups 5 reps/side
• kettlebell swings 22 reps

Felt a little easy through the first half, but the bent over rows and get ups sorted that one out.  Especially the get ups.  I had to do them in sets of one per side.  Next challenge is to try to get through them in sets of five, and then work towards doing a full get up.  Felt good to be really pushed by an exercise and still keep going.  Not entirely sure there was much of a leg focus with this though.  May have to double the umbers in each set of prisoner squat, add some weight, or change it to a squat jump.  I’ll hold off judgement on that until I see how my legs feel in the morning.

 

Went through this for the first time today.  Russian lunges, clap press-ups, explosive pull ups and explosive throws.  I have to be honest and say that in my case the pull ups weren’t very explosive.  Although I’m in reasonable command of my body weight, I’ve never had much in the way of speed.  As most of power comes from the speed of the muscle contraction, that would explain why I don’t have a very good explosive response.  I had to do the press ups on my knees for the same reason.

Still, it’s a good start.  I finished the whole thing, and if I keep doing it (or similar routines) then presumably I’ll get better.

It’s been a while.

Ran through this for the first time in absolutely ages.  Still painfully hard work.

30 is looming into site on the horizon.  The first rash of parties/commiserations have hit and gone, as well as the first purchase of a sports car for impractical reasons…

I’ve been mentally excusing myself from things for far too long, in the hope that a perfect combination of circumstances would randomly arise that means I’d have the three months spare to devote myself entirely to ‘getting in shape’.  Slowly the realisation has crept up on me that there will never be a perfect combination of circumstance.  Even if I won the lottery and never had to work again, there’d still be something.  As I haven’t won the lottery, and I’m still working as a teacher, there’s lots of somethings.

There will always be time for exercise.  I just have to make the time.  I can do that by making a few extremely trivial sacrifices.  Bad T.V.  Video games.  Facebook procrastination.  Most of the electronic ephemera that surrounds my life serves to distract rather than to assist my attempts to reach my daily goals.  That said, removing it will still leave a space for a while.  Electronic addiction. Fluff for the brain.  Do you think any truly high achieving individual spends a lot of time on their facebook page?

I don’t either.  Time to bring the noise.

Ran a 10k yesterday.  Despite the ‘undulating’ (translation: shortish, brutal nasty uphills followed by gradual decents where a lot of people overtook me) terrain, I managed to get under 45 minutes for the first time ever.  I’m not sure if it’s not smoking (no cigarettes since 2009) or primal living (there may well have been a pizza and ice cream blip the night before), but I’m really pleased.  A while back I said that I wanted to be able to run 3 miles in 22.5 minutes in any conditions.  I think ‘having already run 3 miles in 22.5 minutes’ covers that rather nicely.

On the downside, I think I need to increase the amount of stretching I do, because this morning my right leg is complaining.  A lot.  Bad shows and running fast on tarmac probably don’t help.  When I have the money I intend to buy a pair of Vibrams.  That should help with the shoe side of things, and get my running stance sorted out.  Not sure if they’ll be able to cope with tarmac though, so may have to do a few more cross country runs.