Square One

I skipped my workout two weeks ago today. Then, I was sick for, like, a week. Then, I was catching up on all of the crap I wasn't able to get done while I was sick. When all was said and done, I'd missed more than two weeks of workouts. Two weeks. Brutal. So, I'm starting over with week one. Again. I'm in the middle of my push-ups and sit-ups as I write this, and my wrists are giving me very unpleasant sensations. Three sets will be more than enough. My plan for the rest of the evening is to do two more sets of twenty sit-ups and fifteen push-ups, followed by Arabic flash cards and then, time permitting, a sura out of the Quran. Having basically lost the two last weeks, I'm eager to catch up on all fronts.

UPDATE: Screw it. I cranked out the fourth set, and they weren't fantastic, but they were pretty good. Who dares wins, right? On to the Arabic.

UPDATE: I did the first half of the next sura that was up, but skipped the flash cards. Today, I'll do flash cards and the other half of the sura.

Wipeout

Cue ominous surf music.

So, my goal for last week was to do the entirety of the Week Two workout program, plus a bunch of Arabic stuff. What did I accomplish? See below.

What actually happened was that I skipped on Monday, woke up with a light cold on Tuesday morning, and am just coughing up the last elements of it now. I'm doing much better, but on Tuesday and Wednesday, it was all I could do to get to work, work eight hours, and get back to the house. I was dead tired. The rest of the week, and yesterday, I've been trying to take it easy so that I can shake it as quickly as possible. I should be at ninety-five percent or better tomorrow (Monday), so I plan to resume in earnest. We'll see if I can do the week two program - the last time I skipped a whole week, it didn't go so well. At most, this will be a setback.

I also got very little Arabic done, and I'll be hitting that hard this week, too.

What's this?

Is this a near-complete lack of soreness? Weird. I kind of forgot what that was like. The only pain I have after a week of classes (okay, that's only two classes) is a little, tiny, barely noticeable bit of soreness in my right calf (you remember, the one that I tore all those years ago, and the reason for me screwing my ankle up). This means that it's time for me to restart my at-home workouts again.

Mrs. Chops and I have been slacking at home, big time. So we'll be getting back into FlowFit again, still at level 3. Tonight we'll start with a High Intensity day, since the Mrs has plans to go out with her friends tomorrow night. Then we'll be back on the 4x7 on Sunday, with a Low Intensity day. At least, this is the plan. We'll see how things actually turn out.

MMA class this week was all about some knees. We quickly covered the three kinds of Muay Thai knees - the straight knee (also called the spear knee or thrust knee), the up knee, and the curve knee (sometimes called the outside knee). These can all be delivered from the clinch, which we very briefly went over. Then we held pads and kneed the bejebus out of each other. Good times. Also some kicking, to review from last week. That's about it.

End of Week One - Again

As I write this, I have one set of pushups and situps left before I will have completed Week One. The only thing I won't have done is the yomp, and that's the least important part. Four solid swims, and three decent pushup/situp sets are pretty good in my book. Tomorrow, I'll transition into Week Two. Beyond the swimming, push-ups, and sit-ups, I hope to get the yomp and the stretching in this week, both of which should help. Here's what's on the coming week's agenda.

four 25 minute swim workouts

one 35 minute yomp with 25 pound rucksack

three days of four sets of twenty pushups and twenty situps

stretching - please, for the love of all things holy, stretching

Arabic wasn't top notch this past week. I'll try to do better in the coming week. I'm hoping to do a sura from the Quran, as well as at least one lesson from my textbook, in addition to flash cards.

Here I go...

Week One Redux

Here's this week's rundown so far.

Monday: Skipped entirely. I was feeling lousy when I left work.

Tuesday: 25 minute swim, 45 push-ups, 60 sit-ups

Wednesday: 25 minute swim (Finished my laps thirty seconds before they kicked us out for lightning - didn't get a cool down, but that was okay.)

Thursday: 25 minute swim, 45 push-ups, 60 sit-ups

The game plan for today is another swim, and hopefully some stretching. The intent is to stretch on the days that I'm not doing push-ups and sit-ups, but I haven't been doing it as regularly as I should - to include not at all this week. Tomorrow, I'll do the final of the three sets of push-ups and sit-ups, and I'm considering going for a yomp in a local park. Either way, assuming that I get one more swim, and the push-ups and sit-ups, I'll go into Week Two on Monday - the yomps are important, but of all the pieces of this workout, they're the part that I'm willing to slack on if need be.

I'll update either this weekend, or early next week with my final report for Week One. I think I'm starting to make progress, mainly from the swimming since the rest has been a bit inconsistent. Oh, and welcome back, Chops! I'm thrilled with what I'm doing, but Chops is making me look like a slacker.

What? That's impossible!

That's right, two posts this week. Crazy, eh?

So this workout was pretty much a repeat of Tuesday's workout. The main difference being that when it was your turn to rotate to the shadow boxing station, first you got to hit a big ass tire with a sledgehammer 20 times each side, then you were allowed to shadow box. It should be noted, I like sledgehammers.

Also, today during "warm ups" (really? 30 minutes of grueling calisthenics is a warm up?), the instructor said "There are two of you here that will be ready to fight in six months. I can get you some smokers matches if you're interested." Then, during the bicycle crunches, he stood next to me and said "When I said there were two, you're one of them. SO GET YOUR LEGS UP IN THE AIR!" So it looks like I might be fighting later this year, or early next year, if I stick with it. For those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of "smokers", it's like intramurals for fighters. Think friendly match between students, for the sake of learning and experience. Anyway, I guess all those years of Muay Thai didn't disappear on me, which makes me feel pretty good.

Week...uh...5?

I have totally lost count of what week I'm on for the MMA class. If I cared enough, I could probably dig through my email and find the start date, but it's not really that important to me. I do know that this week we started kicks. Yay! I love kicking, which probably goes back to starting soccer at age 4. We also changed our fitness routine. Now, we start with the jump ropes immediately at 8am. We do that for, say, five minutes? Not sure, wasn't looking at the clock. Then we did two sets of 8 count bodybuilders (the "minimum" is 15, which I didn't hit in either set), then some footwork/legwork kind of drills which I don't really know how to describe. This was followed by some core work consisting of bicycle crunches and two other sadistic sorts of crunches. All of that was one round. We did a total of two rounds (not too bad, it came out to about 35 minutes worth of calisthenics), then on to the kicking.

We worked round kicks to the thighs for power, both sides, then round kicks to the head for speed, both sides. Then we worked on foot jab with the left, foot jab with the right, then a 1-2, bob and weave under a hook, high right kick combination. There were five of us, so we had to keep rotating out to shadow box in the mirror. It was a good fun class, and my ankle held up well, even with all the kicking, which can put a lot of stress on the support ankle.

I even got there early enough to get most of the way through an Intuflow session before starting the jump rope.

Tuesday Night

I've slacked a bit on my Arabic over the last few days. I was supposed to do a sura tonight, but both of the ones that I have on deck were half an hour, and I didn't have half an hour to give. I did flash cards this morning, and I'll do them again tomorrow morning. I'm going to assume that I'll have half an hour tomorrow night to do a sura, and that I'll do flash cards in the morning (and hopefully tomorrow evening). We'll see what happens.

With respect to my workout, last week was a little bit of a mess, but I got in four swims (which is the core of the entire plan, so that was the most important part), but only one push-up/sit-up workout. I had hoped to do week two starting tonight, but when I was ready to do my push-ups, I defaulted to week one. So, this will be a repeat of week one, with the hope that I'll finish it again and be able to launch into week two next week. I was feeling lousy yesterday, and skipped the pool workout, but today I did a solid twenty-five minutes, plus the push-ups and sit-ups. That means a pool workout and stretching tomorrow night, plus two more push-up/sit-up workouts, two more swims, a yomp, and a couple more days of stretching. Being able to discipline myself tonight, when I really wanted to put the push-ups and sit-ups off for another night, is good progress from late May, when my YMCA pass hadn't been scanned since early January.

As far as results, I've been swimming either constantly or somewhat regularly now since either late May or early June, with a few interrupted weeks in there. My weight isn't fluctuating, at all, which is a disappointment; but when I look in the mirror, the stretch marks around my navel (ugh, depressing) are less pronounced, as if they may be starting to heal up; and I feel like my belly itself, which is where I carry a lot of my excess weight, is starting to recede a bit. I don't really notice much difference in clothing fit yet - just a hair with some shirts, maybe - so that will probably continue to be the indicator I look at, in lieu of actually measuring the diameter of my belly on a weekly basis.

It's progress on both fronts, Arabic and getting in shape.

The absence, it has become habitual

Okay, so The Fly has goaded me into an update. Things have been a bit, uh, complicated, in Chopsland. Where to start?

I started taking the MMA class offered at work. I stopped all my other working out for a week or two until my body got used to the workload of the class. Then, I managed to mess up my right ankle pretty good. So I took week 3 off of class, which was fine, since the instructor said I could make up the classes when I was feeling better. I did a lot of ankle mobility stuff (thanks, Intuflow!) and tons of balance drills (4CBD, thanks again to Intuflow) to rehab the ankle. As soon as it felt stable enough to get back to class, I ended up driving to the great Pacific Northwest to visit family. It was very, very short notice. As in, less than 4 days. So I ended up taking a total of 2 weeks off of class. Finally, this week I got back into class on Tuesday morning, only to find out that Thursday's class had been cancelled. Which is fine, since on Friday morning, I'm still sore from Tuesday. Ouch. Anyway, I'm back on the wagon, but I've got 2.5 weeks worth of classes to make up.

Class itself is fun. It's mostly focused on fitness, with maybe the last 20 minutes working on technique. Since we have some absolute beginners, we're going very slow, which is good. Week one was the jab, next week was the cross, then the hooks, then uppercuts, and this week we worked elbows. I have an annoying (to my wife) habit of shadowboxing at random intervals, especially in the kitchen when I'm cooking, or in the backyard when I'm watching the boys. Despite that, my first hook on the pads was awful. Like, embarrassingly so. The elbows, oddly enough, felt awesome. I managed to throw a few dozen without scraping all the skin off of my elbows, too, which is good. Maybe those calluses are still there after all.

I've been giving some thought to what I'm going to do when this class is done. It's only a total of 10 weeks long. After that, there's going to be another 10 week module dedicated to clinch work, then after that, another one focused on groundwork (mainly escapes to standing, he says). But instead of that, I've been giving a lot of thought to going to train at the BJJ place close to work on my lunch breaks. I've avoided BJJ for a long time, and I'm starting to feel that I should give it some attention for awhile. For now though, I need to get back on track with my weight loss (which has been stalled out for about 2 weeks). I should also get back on with the knife reps and get that stuff over with. *sigh*

If It's Not Scottish...

My workout regimen the last couple of weeks has definitely not been Scottish, it's been crap. Last week, a combination of electrical storms and work chaos prevented me from getting in more than one swim - I'll take some credit for not trying hard enough to get stuff scheduled in, but seriously, a lot of it wasn't within my control.

This week, it's been mostly electrical storms, with a big dose of traffic last night, and a touch of last week thrown in throughout for bad measure. I did all of my situps on Monday night, and I technically did all of my pushups, but I think my form was lousy on some of them (if I'm doing it for my own sake, I may as well push myself to do good form, as opposed to the half-assed job of it that we all used to do in the Navy just so we'd pass the PRT). During the last two sets (out of four sets of twenty pushups), I faltered near the end, and had to make them up. I finished out strong, and I think I technically did three or four more than I needed to, but like I said, the form wasn't stellar on all of them. I think a big part of the problem is that since I didn't do any last week, I don't benefit from continuous improvement - pushup capability tends to atrophy if you don't keep up with the gradual pyramid.

My hope is that the weather will clear a bit tomorrow, and since I'll be getting off work about half an hour earlier than expected to begin with (earlier if I can get there early), I'm hoping that I'll beat the afternoon and/or evening storm that we've had the last few nights. I'm still annoyed that the YMCA closes the indoor pool at the first flash of lightning - everyone I've mentioned this to has said that's stupid, and since they include a Navy P-3 Orion pilot and a diesel engine mechanic, I'm guessing that their backgrounds indicate that my initial reaction of "WTF? Closing an indoor pool for lightning?" was right on the money. What can I say, it's Virginia, even if it's not the deep south, there's still that pesky Mason-Dixon line.

Against my wishes, but following my better judgment, I think my best bet is to spend next week repeating the Week 1 plan, and go into week two the week after. All of the aforementioned chaos at work should be largely done after this week, and if I can get back on a regular post-work swim schedule that beats the average time of the electrical storms, I should be in pretty good shape. If I'd gotten a good go this week, I think I would have been okay, but with two cancelled swim workouts and a horrible showing on the pushups, I think a repeat of Week 1 is probably my best long-term bet, no matter how much I hate it.

As far as Arabic goes, I've been slacking on the flash cards over the last couple of days because I haven't had time to re-stack them after memorizing those words I'd been having trouble with. On the plus side, I've done listening/reading exercises from the Quran this week: سورة الواقعة (Surat al Waqiah, "the Inevitable", "the Event") on Tuesday, and سورة الحديد (Surat al Hadid, "The Iron") tonight. By the end of the weekend, I'm going to set my textbook and CD wallet up on my kitchen table with the hope that next week, I can spend an hour on Tuesday night and an hour on Thursday night doing a sura each night, followed by a lesson out of the textbook, plus flash cards in the morning and at night. Part of my recent success/pseudo-success in doing pool workouts has been preparing at night for the next morning in order to get to work early and leave early. My hope is that by doing a little bit of preparation and staging, I can facilitate more aggressive Arabic study by having the resources staged before me.

So, that's my status so far for this week: satisfactory on the Arabic, unsatisfactory on the workouts, but with the potential to improve by the time I rack out on Sunday evening.

Chops! I'm lapping you, buddy! You've done a great job of keeping me accountable, now it's my turn - time to get back to it! If you're already doing it (which I know you are from our brief conversations), it's time to post a few lines so that we know what's going on in Chopsland.

Trying Again

About a week and a half ago, I reported that I'd successfully completed the first week of my fitness schedule. Last week was a total bust. Due to forces beyond my control, and a few within my control, I lost any trace of momentum early in the week, and by Thursday and Friday, I just didn't care. I'm going to try to do week two this week, as opposed to restarting with week one. Week two calls for:

four 25 minute swims

one 35 minute yomp with 25 pound rucksack

three days of four sets of twenty situps and twenty pushups

The last part will be the tough one. Hopefully a week wasn't enough to atrophy my muscles to the point of being useless for this.

Arabic's going fine, though nothing done beyond flash cards last week. That is all. Thank you.