6/21/08

6/21/08

Warmup
25 squats
20 jumping squats
15 mountain climbers (only managed 12)
10 burpees
5 pistols - each leg
25 situps
20 v-ups
15 hollow rocks (lost count - probably 15?)

WOD
For Time:
20 rounds

10 push-ups
10 KB swing 55#/35# (sub 24#)

Results:
15 rounds 51:35

my arms totally gave out on me on this. Hence the 15 rounds instead of 20. I could still do the KB swings fairly consistently - usually only 1, very occasionally 2, fails in a set, but I just could not do any more pushups.

I started off well - and my form has gotten much better. Though there were no sets that where I managed 10 straight pushups. For most of the rounds I could get 5-6 consecutive, and then I had to rest once or twice to finish the set.

For my first few rounds, I barely used my knees at all - mostly just for a touch at the bottom of the rom. The middle rounds were straightleg down, knees all the way back up. The last 3 rounds were knees down and back up (which I only switched to after hitting my nose on the ground a couple times when my arms just gave out on me). By the last round I could barely string two pushups together in a row, despite making them as easy as I could.

I suppose i could have found a step or bench to raise the angle and simplify them further, but everyone else was done, and (more importantly) we had a wedding we needed to get to, so I didn't have another 15-30 minutes to gut it out (and I didn't want to be a total zombie by the time we got there).

Possibly I should have started the knees full up sooner to conserve strength for later rounds. Also, my feet tend to slip out from underneath me when I am doing pushups, so I have to spend a lot of energy resetting them - not quite every rep, but several reps within a set. I need to ask Max if I am doing something wrong that causes this, or if it's just a side affect of the weakness in my right side, or ... what.

One thing that i was quite pleased with was the consistency of my KB swings. I considered trying this with the 35# bell - but I tried a couple swings with it before the WOD started, and couldn't *quite* manage it. I'm close, but I definitely wasn't going to be able to do a significant number of them. But with the 24# bell I had several sets of unbroken reps (several sets of broken reps, too ). I learned that as long as I kept the arch in my lower back, I could pretty much keep going; even if i came down or went up a little off kilter, I could generally recover, but once I lost the arch, I'd get thrown off balance and have to start over.

Something else I am really pleased with: even though I worked myself to complete muscular exhaustion with the pushups, my energy after class was still really good. It was nothing like the workout I did may 28th where I got through 125 pushups, and was a crying exhausted mess afterwards. (Which was just before we realized that I just wasn't getting enough calories.) I feel like the poster girl for what a difference good nutrition can make