2007-12-30

Early afternoon:

Volume 2 of the Iron Core kettlebell DVD with Wifey. I used my brand spankin' new 35 pounder (that's 16kg = 1 pood)... I'd played around with Wifey's 10 pounder, and didn't think the workout would be that taxing.

I was wrong. It worked me hard. My arms are bruised from bad form, and some of the snatches towards the end were actually very difficult to do. The intensity isn't Crossfit, but the sheer volume makes up for it by the end. My grip was fried, compounded by the fact that my hands sweat bigtime. I'm a big fan of the Kettlebells now!

My favorite part of the workout: Wifey doesn't like Turkish Get-Ups, so she doesn't do them. I reasoned with her as calmly as I could, and we settled on her doing them without any weight at all. We had the most wonderfully nonsensical debate about it, too.

"I don't think they are good exercises, so I don't do them" she said.

"Is that because you can't do them?"

"I just think you'd hurt yourself if you did them wrong." What, like dropping the KB on your head? Yep, that would hurt.

"Well, you could do them without any weight, just to work on form."

"But then it wouldn't be an exercise, because there's no weight. What's the point in doing that?"

*groan* She had me there, with her impeccable logic. :)

I cajoled her into doing them, though, and she did very well. I can see why she doesn't like them- her hips aren't happy with her as far as range of motion goes, especially in the transition between sitting up and getting your feet underneath you. You could see where they limited her movements. She did great on the other exercises- I think they will help her get there flexibility-wise.

Training with her is fun when we can do it unencumbered. For a while there we were swinging the weights in sync, side by side. Most of my workouts are pretty lonely and lacking external motivation, this was nicely different. It's also fascinating to watch how somebody else learns something. She's good at totally different things than me.

We also did this workout parent style. Not only were we juggling kettlebells and rewinding the DVD, we were juggling Owen. For a while, we had him upstairs in his favorite swing, so you had to sprint upstairs to check on him after doing your segment.

After that, it was time for some light Crossfit. You know, just to work out the kinks. I had the idea that I could maybe do this one in under 20 minutes.

5 rounds for time of:
500 meter Row
50 Squats
30 Back extensions

Turns out, I was right, but not by much. It was brutal, and I couldn't afford any rests or to let the performance drop off at all. The pacing worked out pretty well:

As Rx'ed:

Round/Time
1/3:49.76
2/3:58.77
3/4:03.41
4/4:00.59
5/3:50.66

Total: 19:43.19

Rowing at 1:48-1:50 pace, 28-30 strokes/minute
All squats unbroken. Need to work on form here- could have been deeper.
Most back extensions broken 15/15 or 20/10.

I really do need to work on my squats some more though. I'm fighting a minor groin pull from the 150 burpee workout on Christmas, so that's a bit of a limitation as to how low I can go, but I'll keep working it. We don't have anything the right height at the gym to get my legs parallel to the ground, so I have to stack things on Plyo boxes. Hard things that, er... hurt when you land too hard. Since the workout didn't say "Smash your balls against a 25-pound weight 250 times, for time", I skipped that bit and did it freestyle.