One fifth of the way through the month and I’m not dead yet. Good. I’m thankful for small mercies this evening when most of my body aches from the gym.
When I was going to the gym in the last few months of 2014 I was going on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and then eating pies, drinking beer and sitting on my backside through the weekend (a bit). I don’t think that this is the best way to aim for a healthy regime, so in January I’m going to experiment with going to the gym every other day, regardless of what day it is. This week it’s Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday; next week it’s Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It means that my “intervals on Monday” rule is tricky every other week, but I’m hoping that the running will fit in and that everything will come out in the wash.
Of course, everything may change as soon as Jude goes to Africa next week. Which I may not have mentioned here yet. Next week, Jude’s away for the best part of three weeks. Most of which time will be spent doing awesome things in Nairobi with a charity called Porridge and Rice. While this is all very worthy and good, my main concern is getting through the three weeks with the children in one piece, everyone fed, everything cleaned (to a point), exercises done and most importantly, work done. If it all works, it’ll be a miracle. No doubt I’ll complain bitterly about it here.
So today’s exciting exercises consisted of: 4k walk to school and back to get the children, a trip to the gym for an hour with a short warm-up run of six minutes getting me a little over 1k. I didn’t want to break myself because I was starting a new NROL programme – Hypertrophy I “B” week 1 (to be precise).
The walk was fine. It takes about 22 minutes to get to the school walking around County Road. As the plan is to usually walk for 30+ minutes, it’s quite a bit shy of the mark. I was thinking that the return journey would easily take me over the 30 minutes – which it did, but they’re not great minutes. Going to the school, I’m motoring along the pavement, striding out and letting nothing stop me get to my destination. On the way back there is dawdling, friends that the children absolutely must talk to, sweet shops to try and avoid, and a much much slower pace. So a 48 minute 4km walk is one thing, but in future I will take a more circuitous route to the school and get my 30 minutes decent walk in before picking the children up. I’ve reassured the children that it’s not every day, but that might depend on the weather…
The gym session was good too. The NROL hypertrophy programme works on a principle of “undulating periodization”. In other words, some sessions you do lots of lighter reps and some sessions you do fewer heavier reps. There’s a table with all the combinations and I’ve done my usual of setting up a google spreadsheet with the exercises, reps, sets weights and notes along with an Evernote sheet with screengrabs of all the associated exercises and handy notes.
I must look like a terrible geek in the gym, prodding away at my ipad, reminding myself how an exercise is done and then finally pottering off to get some weights, or a swiss ball, but it’s interesting and the more that I do it, the more I’m finding it fun. And hard. And sore…
Strides tells me that I’m making good progress on the three fronts of running, walking and strength training and will hit my targets for the year. My weight, however, is still suffering from my enthusiastic enjoyment of food and drink over the holidays. It’s a good job that Christmas only comes once a year, because by the looks of it, it’s going to take the whole of January to lose the weight I put on in one week. Still everything gets a tick against it today; so that’s all good.