Day 22 - Week Four Commences...

Love this.

As week 4 begins I find myself all a-tingle with the excitement that making new habits brings. I find that although it is hard being away from my beautiful Winnie, I am getting better at dealing with being away from the person who actually gets me best. It's still hard, but training is my coping mechanism.

Six O'Clock Shoulders

This morning was a toughie. A bit down after such a weekend of awesomeness, I got out of my bed and got on with my normal routine. I trudged to the gym in the rather 'fresh' cool air, which hit like knives after my cosy bed, and got into my first muscle group of the week. Shoulders were the pick of the day. I found myself starting slow, but warming up pretty quickly. It was good to see Mr Q at the gym - he's not so much of an early bird, but kudos to him for getting down there! Shoulders today, I focussed on the pushing my existing limits (carefully) and really training the muscles connecting my shoulders with some little tweaky exercises. I used a few tricks I've been learning lately to find the sweet spot in my training, and it feels like its starting to come together. I just hope I can sustain it, over easter! I incorporated more free weights into the core workout, then utilised the machines to 'finish' me off.

The workout this morning concluded with some light weight burn out sets to failure on the cable cross-overs, doing isolated single arm work - front raises and flyes to the side. I can definitely feel like I gave my shoulders a pretty good go over. Boom!

Pumped Cardio 

So, iPhone pre-loaded with new upbeat tracks I headed to the gym for the second time today. I feel its also important to point out that I try to include cardio into my routine, it seems to calm my mind and flush me with memories of the bad-old days of hardcore kickboxing, squash and gym training with Mr Mouldie. I miss that dude! Perhaps one day he'll bring Miss Kimbers to Australia to visit?….

I spent 60 minutes doing another fairly hardcore cardio burnout: Bag work (mostly upper body), shadow boxing, side lunges using the half-ball thingo, med-ball wall bounces with lunging calf-raises (I progressed from 5 sets of low, medium and high using the 4kg ball to the same with a 5kg ball), speed bag / reaction boxing and kwon board uppercuts and jabs. I spent a couple of tracks just rotating between skipping and burning up my shoulders using a big rope and a kinda drumming action (insert imagination here - think of me sweaty and jacked into the music drumming with huge ropes, making sinusoidal patterns with it!). I followed this up with around 15 minutes of abdominal work.

Swim-Chillax

Swimming is my cool down at the moment, so I jumped in and smashed out a 500m swim in 14 minutes. A little slower than usual, I was working on technique. I was focusing on the tumble turn and kick off to conserve some energy. I'm finding knocking out 500m-1km quite comfortable these days - which is my aim! After my swim, I was reluctant to jump out of the 28 degree bathtub in the fresh cool evening air…and relaxed, leaning against my arms on the pool edge, with body in the water in the shallow end…I drifted off. I was initially meditating, my usual relaxing internal chant and breathing with relaxed deep inhalations and exhalations….I was dreaming, and very cosy until I heard one of my instructors talking to his young daughter (about how hard a day I'd had…lol) which roused me and brought me back into the now! I think I could've stayed there heaps longer otherwise!

It's important to properly cool down and relax after a big workout, so after the relax part I jumped out and walked briskly back to my cabin - in my damp gym gear (after dark)….brrrr! Slightly fresher than this morning! A nice hot shower and pre-warmed PJs (thanks to my radiators) saw me warm up nicely!