Workout of the Week - 'Not'

This morning, in the excitement and rush to get out the door for my daughter's first day of preschool, I managed to royally twist my ankle on our front step - one of those seeing-stars kind of pain. Great. So now my ankle is swollen and tender. Guess no Workout of the Week this week. :-\ I will do some arm work and watch my carbs in the meantime until the pain and swelling are gone. Phooey!

Workout of the Week

Man, I am turning out to be quite a wienie on these Workouts of the Week. This week's workout, which Mark deviously calls "Easy as 1-2-3":

1 pullup (or adaptation, based on your level of fitness)
2 pushups
3 full squats (getting your hips below your knees' standing level)

...as many times as you can, in 20 minutes. Mark noted in the comments that a very fit male should be able to do around 50 cycles of this (!!) in that time frame.

Me? 20 cycles after 16:10, at which point I stopped before I passed out underneath the pullup bar, leaving my 3.5 year old and 8 month old to fend for themselves on a public playground. I was sweating like an iced tea in the sun on the Fourth of July. My palms are slighly worse for wear - not blistered, but definitely victims of friction.

I have never - that I can recall - done a full body unassisted pullup in my life, even during my years of swimming in high school swim team. So - if Primal Blueprint Fitness ever gets me to a point of doing one Grade A genuine pullup, I might literally burst into tears of joy. But getting there requires both strength building and weight loss. For now, I'm doing Mark's suggested adaptation of "from one foot propped below, then pulled up as high as possible".

All this said, if you don't have a pullup bar at your disposal, check out one of your local playgrounds - odds are very good that even if there's no "official" pullup bar, there are enough high-up horizontal poles to serve the purpose. Go early in the morning for a vacated playground and lowest temps, but bring a towel in case you need to wipe the morning dew off the bars. Also carefully test the bar for sturdiness with respect to your body weight.

Workout of the Week Wednesday

"Ooooof" I sighed as I stood up from this morning's breakfast table.

"Why are you going '[Oooof]', Mommy?"

Good question. Yesterday, I did a partial rendition of Mark's Workout of the Week - this week's being "Grok's Rock". I did 5 sprints, 5 lunge sets, and 5 Grok crawl sets (though I'm not sure that I had the right distances on these), and I did 3 "rock throws" - or rather in my case, hoisting (not throwing) my 25 lb. 8 month old above my head from a fully squatted position a few times per set. Meanwhile, my three-year-old had been scaling the local playground just a few feet away.

Sweet maximized gluteus, my muscles are sore. I even had a banana yesterday and they are still burnin' today. Stairs and getting up and down from a sitting position are like whoa. I take comfort, though, knowing that the revenge of lactic acid is somewhat offset by my three-year-old Grokette's noticing that I am actually making an effort to be active.

So it's a good thing -

"Well, Mommy's muscles aren't used to being exercised, so they're sore. But it's OK; I know that they'll feel better tomorrow."

"Maybe some coffee would help you feel better."

Ha! Love Grokette's logic. If only I hadn't been off caffeine since last spring, when I had become pregnant with my second. (I'm still off it, too, since I'm nursing.)

Workout of the Week Wednesday

I've been eating primally for nearly two months now - loving the menu, and how it makes me feel. But now it's time for me to get real about fitness. Mark's Daily Apple just kicked off its inaugural Workout of the Week series. Great! I thought. This week's was:

50 meter sprint
10 jumping squats
10 pushups

Basically, do the above as many times as you can, in 12 minutes.

I got psyched up yesterday morning. Today's the day! I thought. I put on running shoes (I don't own Vibrams yet and the grass was unmowed and soaking wet...hardly ideal conditions for my out of shape booty to try out barefoot running). I put the exersaucer on the back porch for my 8-month old daughter. I set my three-year-old daughter up with instructions to play on our back yard's playground while I did my thing. I counted the paces around my yard to approximate the 50 meters. I even downloaded a free stopwatch app on my Droid and called it up for a 12 minute countdown. Boy, was I going to milk this workout.

Then I ran. The first sprint was great, the set of jumping squats was appropriately challenging. I even cranked out 10 pushups. Then I sprinted again, and the second set of jumping squats was already so much harder.

Y'all, I made it through just two and a half minutes of the prescribed 12 minutes before I needed to get a break. Workout of the Week? More like Wuss of the Week!

But today I take comfort in the fact that I'm a bit sore - in a good way. I also take comfort in the concept of once weekly sprinting. ;-)