02 May 2012 workout and some eats

Short comment to keep me honest on workouts and diet.

8:30 am workout
400m run
10, 9, 8, …., 2, 1 reps of
Pullups
Pushups (hand release)
Situps (heels together)
400m run

My time was 16:46 and dead last, but only by a few seconds.  Several guys finished in under 10.  I think my time will shorten considerably when I can string together kipping pullups.  Right now I have to take an extra swing between reps.  Know how I plan on getting this skill?  Practice.

Eating on the semi- paleo was good until the evening.  I haf a salad at dinner, but the allergies were acting up so I ate a bunch of oranges and around 9 pm I lost it and drank a glass and a half of college chocolate almond milk.  It has a good deal of sugar in it, but I figure with a day or so of dietary return will abolish the effect.

Besides, I have been reading and thinking about carb cycling and cheat days and how important they are and will write more about them later.

Finally, my weight was 171 lbs and seems to be slowly going down or hovering.  I think my goal is to lose the love handles and not so much a specific weight.  However, if I could lose 10 it would put me that much closer to body weight Olympic lifts.

Goals – April 2012

I have a lot of goals.  They float around my head and nip at me like cuttlefish.  They jump around my brain and pull my hair and fling poo like the mind-monkeys they are.

Old pal asked that I enunciate my goals if I’m going to keep posting about my workouts.  Well, I have a bit on that.  I like to comment on my workouts.  I like to reinforce them with writing.  It feels like they are more real and more of an event rather than 45 minutes twiddling my thumbs and listening to heavy metal while ‘spinning’ or jogging.

But that has nothing to do with my goals.  I have wants.  Needs even.  First – bodyweight snatch.  I love that lift.  And bodyweight is a great milestone.  However, I’m a ways away from it.  I have a 135# clean and a 140# jerk and a 105# snatch.  Those lifts typically fall in ranges like that (C&J ~ 130% snatch).  So, the BW snatch is tentatively set for 2013.  However, there are a couple of things along the way.  I would like to get to 165 (again).  Also, my Oly lifts can use a lot of skill development.  I mean, I don’t think I have *ever* done a proper squat snatch like you see those guys in the olympics.  I do a power snatch – meaning my thighs are >> parallel.  With the right training I should be able to jump under a lot better and watch my lift numbers grow.  On the other hand, my overhead squat kind of sucks.  It’s stuck at about 85# conservatively.  So, there are clear roads to improvement – accessory exercises = snatch balance, squat clean, OH squat etc.

But that’s just a lifting goal.  I don’t really have much more of those.  Most of the others – athletic goals that is – are of the body dimension / type or of the acrobatic variety.  Body dimension – I always wanted wider shoulders.  I’m kind of good in the thickness-of-chest dimension.  However, I’d love wider shoulders.  How to?  Handstands & handstand push ups.  Secondly, love handles – they need to disappear.  Some of that is happening with diet and exercise (*gasp* that actually works?  what about cucumber smoothies and the south beach diet?).  Some of that is getting help from fun things like spiderman pullups and hanging from a bar and touching your left knee to your right elbow and reversing it.  Honestly, a lot is happening from just remembering to suck in my lower gut all day.  It helps now that I can finally find the muscle that holds in my lower gut.  I used to only suck in the upper part which made me weird looking.  OK.  Weirder.  Fine.  You win.

Acrobatic goals are pretty far fetched and I haven’t really enacted the plans on them.  However, handstands are the key to a lot of them.  I would like to flip on regular ground – maybe grass;  I might never graduate to cement and I’ll be OK with that.  I am chicken on the back flip and I front flip on trampolines and foam pits.  Again, this is pretty easy to advance.  Go to a tumbling studio; hang out with the UA tricks guys.  Along with that, I would love to have a kong vault on cement.  This one I can do moderately well in the gymnasium.  But I would like to be able to “count on it” in the wild as it were.

So, without further ado – here’s an old plot of my weight as a function of time.  The plot starts somewhere around January 2011.  I joined wildcat crossfit in late December 2011.  I had been bicycling 16 miles per day prior to that.  With the whole ‘paleo’ diet I started experimenting with low carbs, high veggies & egg whites.  This persisted throughout April and May and sort of tapered off since.  I stopped crossfit in May or so of 2011 and started up again after some surgeries around Feb. 2012.  There’s an empty space and about a 5 lb uptick around late November 2011 which is from our trip to Santa Barbara.  I love how the mass melted right off and went right back to my ‘median’ weight of about 170 lbs.  Other than that, I think the plot speaks for itself.  I have about a 3lb cycle and apocryphally, I’ve noticed that Saturdays are some of my lowest digits.  However, after beers & junk on Saturday night, I tend to creep back a bit.

Currently, I’m not as low as this plot shows.  I crept back up to 175 as a max and then have been around 169 – 172 and on a downward trend again lately.

22 April 2012 WCCF workout

The morning was something of a bust.  The internet is out at the house and we ran out of cereal too.  There was enough for maybe half a bowl.  I ended up taking the ten year old terror (TYOT) to the local market on the way to school and got him a bagel.  I thought, well what the hell.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon, so I might as well go get the workout done.

It was a fun one.  Not.  At least these guys don’t last too long.

8 min. of as many rounds as possible (AMRAP):
10 toes-to-bar
20 walking lunges w/ overhead weight 45#/25#
3 min. rest
6 min. AMRAP:
10 push ups
30 double unders

I got 3 rounds + 4 toes-to-bar on the first bit.  I chose to use an intermediate weight for the lunges.  I guess I could have tried 45#, but I don’t really want to push myself too hard on the weight side of things.  On the second part, I got 3 rounds + 4 push ups or so.

OK, now for the execuses.  I hadn’t had any breakfast – just some half-decaf.  I had spent yesterday working on the roof.  Intelligently, I didn’t have any sunscreen – just a hat.  And I was up there from about 1 – 3 pm so I probably was pretty dehydrated.  That didn’t stop me from sweating like mad during the workout.

The good part was that I think I’m starting to get the kip on the toes-to-bar.  It has taken me long enough.  But, I managed to string together a few at a time.  I got 5 in a row on the first round and they felt pretty strong.  The lunges went about as expected.  I did a lot of pauses in the middle, but I had about 10-20% of them just rock on through – although my arms weren’t always real strict on the ‘locked-out elbows’.  Push ups, well, they remain pretty weak for me.  Maybe it was all the ab challenging stuff from the first part?  I find I’m snaking up unless I really focus on mid line stability.  I also find that it’s not my chest, but my shoulder strength that is limiting.  That must be because of my playing with hand position.  Mike has taught that we should have our elbow pits forward, and the hands next to the body and a little bit back from where I usually put them.  Finally, the double unders.  I didn’t get any.  This is sort of interesting for me, because I felt like they were getting better.  I think some of the issue was the fact that I tried on my homemade jump rope + I got some new (used) sneakers that have a big tread on the back and the rope kept getting caught on it.  I tried at the beginning of the warmup to get some DUs, but it was so rough and tiring that I just subbed 3x single unders for all three of my rounds.

I stretched like a beast for at least 10 minutes and enjoyed myself a crap-ton of endorphins.  I pounded down a lot of water and a cup of cream-top plain yogurt when I got back to work.  Not feeling too bad.

 

My idea for a camera made by others!

So, this kind of blew my mind.

First, I see this camera posing as a slingshot.  This completely captures my old idea for a camera that would scare the bajeezus out of someone because it’d be buried in the barrel of a fake pistol.  Yes, I know it’s not really the best of motivations for making a device.  However, I would absolutely love it if there were a dozen or so bike-messenger types uploading a whole website full of startled New York driver pics.

These guys though, took it to the next level.  I assume they are on the up-and-up about their reasoning – it’s for “hunting” in the off-season.  But you have to admit, this camera is just begging to be abused.  I mean, the idea of a camera rifle seems somehow either horribly wrong or totally awesome.  There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground here.

21 April 2012

Open gym means it’s time to get crazy.

3 rounds for time:

5 chest-to-bar pullups

5 squat snatch 65#

5 each side 44# KB press

5 GHD situps

5 boxjumps 30″

Warmup – mostly jumprope and some variants of PVC shoulder movement and the worlds greatest stretch.

The workout?  Well, the last shall be first and why not.  Box jumps have always been a staple since they are such a fundamental movement for my goals.  The GHD situps – these are really only available at the gym as I haven’t fabricated anything that can let me do them at home. The 44# was a heavier kettlebell than I’m used to playing with and that kind of set me at 5 reps (that plus the fact that I wanted a light fast work out).  Squat snatch was supposed to help me get to heavier snatching.  I was hoping that I would be able to get into some deep squats with weight over head.  However, I just kind of got deeper and ended up making myself do an overhead squat.  Prior to the workout I had done some singles up to 85# just trying it out (~ 85% of max) but it just didn’t feel right and the trapezius was spazzing out at times.  Finally, the chest-to-bar pullups needed the use of the red band.  This is probably the 2nd or 3rd smallest band, but I still need it to get my weight substantially over the bar.  Someday, someday, someday there will be a muscle up.  Focus, dedication & drive and I will get there.  Overall the workout was pretty light although it took me 11:32 to get it all done.

17 April 2012

A brief synopsis, a series of vignettes….

I managed to survive the myriad due dates and deadlines.  It was like a veritable minefield, but ’tis done.  I have a long list of pushed-off things occupying the ‘todo’ list and it looks like tomorrow will be filled with executions of many.  Perhaps you can hear the joy in my words as I imagine slashing through them.

Yesterday evening the daughter came by with her old friend.  Mostly it was to see the ten-year-old terror, but also probably to see the dogs.  All three of the aforementioned bipeds took the two quadrapeds on a stroll around the block.  The tail waggers were thrilled.

Ben & I got the morning thing down pretty well.  There was a quick dash to the supermarket for cat food, but it didn’t delay anything.  He’s got some systemitized testing going on and it’s really annoying to me.  Some day in the near future I’ll reveal my opinions of these standardized tests, but it’ll probably not surprise anyone.  He says he’s doing well in them and he has only one more day of it so I’m hoping for the best.  I’m thinking that bracketing the testing week with Spring Fling first and the Manzanita carnival after, will be a nice way of balancing out the boy.  This evening in Goshin-jitsu, he got kneed in the privates.  I didn’t know – I came in about halfway through the lesson and he was sitting on the edge of the stage in the auditorium where the class is held – along with all the parents watching their wee warriors.  He looked real sad and told me about it.  After a while the pain must have passed and the senior student came over to bring him back onto the practice mat.  It was nice because I like to watch him teach the other kids about the throws.  He’s pretty good at the material and getting better at transmitting it to the smaller ones.

In the morning, I went to Wildcat CF again.  I know – two days in a row?!?.  Well, it was weights today which I really enjoy.  I don’t have a rack at home and this was 5×5 shoulder press, 3×5 push press and a 1×5 push jerk.  I was feeling pretty good so I decided to hit close to my maxes.  I’ll have to check the records for the push press, but I remember not doing all the reps recently.  I had a 4-rep only on the second to last shoulder press set and dropped the weight a bit to finish out the last one.  The jerks were fun.  I started out at real low weight again (75#) and tried split jerks with both feet forward.  Wow is my left-foot-forward awkward.  I tried all three at light weight, then went with the ‘wide’ jerk and the split jerk up a bit more and ended up doing a personal record at 140#.  I was mentally gearing up for the lift and thought I was going to do a ‘wide’ jerk – you know, where your landing stance is in the basic squatting position.  However, I ended up doing the split jerk.  It felt good and natural too.

The morning was great in that there was a data hit from Nan’s work with the electron microscopy image reconstructions.  She has The work day was filled with a lot of the usual chaos, interrupted by a nice presentation from the new faculty including a chance for me to talk with her about her work in detail.

1×140# Split jerk personal record – 17 April 2012

I started getting in the habit of turning the plates’ labeled side inwards after working out with a lifter who liked doing that. I thought it didn’t matter, but maybe it has helped me. I think it might have to do with not ‘seeing’ the numeric value of the weight and just lifting.

Workout 2012 April 16

Have a busy day today, but managed to get to a convenient time at the gym.  I realized that if I can get ready for work prior to dropping the ten-year old terror at school, then I can bomb straight down the hill and hit the gym by 8:30.  Today was the first attempt at such an endeavor.  It was a bit hectic because the car was on empty and the house was out of decaf!  But I managed to get there with plenty of time to spare.

Kevin had us warm up with PVC and all the usual drills.  He added a neat one where you have the PVC behind your back and one arm holding the top like a tricep stretch and the other grasping the bottom at the small of your back.  As you pull up you stretch the front of the rotator cuff of the lower arm, and by pulling down you stretch the triceps of the upper arm.  The written warmup was 10 air squats, inchworm along the length of the room, worlds greatest stretch (WGS) on the way back, 10 burpees, 100 single unders and 20 double unders.

WGS is pretty hard to describe, but exceedingly good to do.  Start standing, bring one knee up as high as you can and step out in a lunge.  Make sure your knee is at or slightly behind your ankle.  Take the same elbow as the forward foot and place it as close to your ankle as you can, then put both hands on either side of your front foot, lean back and stretch your hams and calves.  Kevin does the WGS a little different by adding the Atlas stretch (lunge position with upright upper body) before repeating.  It’s the sort of thing where you want to do a nice warming dynamic stretch.  No static stretching before the workout.

I liked todays’ workout because I can feel my kipping pullups coming back and my shoulder strength feels pretty good from working out at home over the weekend – strict pull ups and swinging into front levers.  Also, I’m starting to string along double unders and would like to see if the pressure of the clock and the workout will help.

8 min. AMRAP of

8 pull ups

30 double unders

Rest

Front squat 5×3.

I got 2 rounds + 7 double unders.  So that was 24 pull ups.  I went as prescribed, but I couldn’t get all the double unders and I didn’t want to stand there huffing and puffing and not practicing the pullups.  My cadence was sort of single-single-double.  I could keep that up for maybe 3-5 reps before I needed a break.  Then I finished out the jump rope work with 60 singles.  The kip felt pretty good on the pull ups, but I still can’t do 8 unbroken.  I think I got 5 reps at best.  Of course there were some serious fire-breathers who did 6-10 rounds I think.  Most people got 4-5 rounds done.  So, I don’t feel too far from the pack.

Front squats were a bit more fun.  One of the firebreathers had an injury and didn’t want to go heavy so we shared a rack.  I did 10×45# and 3×95# as a warmup.  From then on it was 3×135#, 3×145#, 3×155#, 3×165#, 3×165#.  It felt pretty good.  I did get a bit of a cramp in the right calf after the warmup but that cleared out during the workout.  I made sure to do a lot of stretching and hydrating at the end.  Now I feel pretty awesome.  I ended up getting into work a little after 9:30, but that’s not so bad that I can’t pull it off a couple times a week.

2012 April 15

It’s been a particularly trying and difficult time.  However, some fun was managed to be obtained.  Why was it so trying?  Well, no sooner than I finish with the gum surgery, I get my wart and a lump on my leg cut off and biopsied.  Lots of stuff is due.  I have to give a talk tomorrow, pay taxes buy Tuesday, facility billing by Monday and self-evaluations last Friday.  Well, I managed to get most of it done.  The talk is more or less ready.  The tax material is more or less organized as I’ve been trying to continue to follow in the ‘Get Things Done’ mode of filing.  Even better, I took the dogs to the dog park, the son to a different park and then to Spring Fling.  We got some good training and tree climbing in at the park.  We also got some good deals at the Fling.  Ben basically got in for free and got a free game where he ended up winning an ‘Angry birds’ doll.

2012 April 09

Saturday’s workout was something I made up.  I like the open gym because I can do that.  Sure, I get some funny looks, but I’m there to improve on what concerns me.  I also like to make use of equipment that I don’t have at home.  So I did:

3 rounds for time

10 GHD situps, 10 box jumps 30″, 10 KB swings 36#, 10 ring dips

I finished all the work in 9:23.  Not too bad – I thought I might have made that a 4 round workout because a lot of the exercises go pretty fast.

 

Today’s workout was a real gut wrencher.  I think the worst part was the rest.  I could feel my heart racing and it took nearly the full minute to “recover”.  I ended up doing better than I thought I would but let’s see how tired I feel tomorrow.

5 three-minute rounds with a minute rest in between:
3 push press 95#
6 front squat 95#
9 kettlebell swings 36#
10 rounds total + 1 FS.

To top it all off, I biked in today.  I’d been meaning to do that more often.  Let’s see how long I can keep it up.