Sunday, September 28, 2008 by Rebecca

Cindy

In 20 minutes, how many rounds of:
5 pullups
10 pushups
15 squats.


Results ... I have no frickin idea. probably 9 or 10 rounds plus 7 pushups.

I, once again, idiotically, decided to try to time every exercise, instead of each round. Not only did my watch run out of laps, but after round 16, for some completely inexplicable reason, started basically quadrupling my round times. I definitely got 6 rounds in the first 10 minutes. But then - even though my watch stopped @ 18.5 minutes - presumably when it ran out of rounds and/or because i didn't start it until i was a few reps into my first pushup round, if i add up the lap times for rounds 16 through 26, i get 36 minutes!!! Yeah - that's not right at all.

Items I can extrapolate from the data from the first six rounds: my pullups and squats were holding pretty consistent around the 25-30 second mark each. My pushup rounds were getting progressively longer with each round. round 1 was about 25 seconds - round 6 was about 1:10. I am sure that this continued to get longer with each round except the last one where i gave up and moved to knee pushups since I was trying to squeeze in a last round before time ran out.

So - say my first 6 rounds took just over 10 minutes say 10:10 ... round 7 probably took 2:20 - 12:30?. Round 8: 2:30 - 15:00, Round 9 2:35 - 17:35 ?

I remember that I finished my last full round with about a minute left, and it would have been faster than the round before it because all pushups were knee pushups instead of full ROM. So i guess it's possible i finished 10 rounds plus 7 push ups. It's hard to know for sure how much my pushups really slowed down. I definitely got at least 9 rounds.

I'm really irritated i don't know for sure. I was looking forward to finally having a benchmark for this workout.

Aside from this issue - i think that my jumping pull-ups were strong, and my squats were better than they've been, but still need work. And I'm considering taking on a pushup challenge to try to improve my pushup stamina. I can get the first 10 pretty easily. But it doesn't take long for them to completely fall apart. I was pretty determined to try to make all my pushups full ROM for this workout - and i would say tyhat except for the last 1.5 rounds about 90% of them were. In each of the later rounds, i could get about the first 4 and then was reduced to sets of 2 and 1 to finish them out. I probably could have gotten 11 or more rounds if i had reverted to knee pushups since these were definitely my limiting factor. STILL - on the otherhand, i am pretty darn excited to have ANY full ROM pushups :-D

3 comments:

Ev said...

Pushups seem to be the hardest element for almost everyone. I would reccomend doing some every day. I don't know if picking a time to do a set amount or just sprinkling them throughout the day would work better for you. I'd probably do 20 (or whatever number over ten that agrees with you) in the morning and 20 in the evening. Do your ten and try for eleven. When you get eleven, try for twelve, until you get 20 in a row.

Melissa Urban said...

First, GOOD GIRL for making sure your push-ups were all full ROM. A 20 round Cindy with half-ass push-ups doesn't mean crap. Second, my push-ups also suck, and if you end up working some kind of push-up program or challenge, please let me know because I would totally do it with you. That way neither of us could slack, and hopefully at the end we'll both suck less. :)

Rebecca said...

Thank you for your good advice, Evelyn, and thank you Melissa for offering to provide the motivation! :-D

Over the last few days I've been trying to get in a "pseudo-max rep" set of pushups. And by pseudo I mean go until my form starts to suffer and I have to rest between reps - not to muscular failure. I seem to max out between 7 and 10 - of course when i tried it on Tuesday, my arms were still pretty sore from Cindy, and they were quivering with effort just to hold me in the plank position :"> (and now Nate has hit my shoulders pretty hard :-p)

I hadn't really thought to get any more formal about it, but that could be fun. I will ponder this :)

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