Friday, February 22, 2013

that's more like it

So this past week, the workout has changed a little bit more.. but the big news is that I am now losing weight after the workouts (the trick is not backsliding over the weekend or by "justifying" Bad Food).  I think I've finally finished putting on whatever new muscle was coming.

I ended up pushing to 2K in swimming last Thursday, and it pretty much wiped me out.  The pool was closed Friday and Monday, and since I was still feeling burned out on Monday I skipped the heavy bag, too.

Starting Tuesday, the workout was basically just 2K swimming.  75% freestyle (no backstroke), the rest breast stroke.  I did take short 2 breath breaks in between laps (25m), but only one 30s break at 1.5km and a couple of breaks just long enough to stretch out my shoulders at 700m and 1600m.  Finish it up by treading water for 2 minutes to cool down.  I'm swimming about 1.8K in 1 hour, so 2K is about 1:10.

At night, I'd do 2 sessions of Bas Rutten's 2 minute boxing CD (around 30 minutes) just to keep working on the shoulder and leg strength.

Repeated that for Wednesday and Thursday, pool closed today.  So I did some bag work for about 45 mins, then swung by the gym for 3x8 powerlifts at roughly the same weight I'd left off at back in December (bench was down 20 and leg press was down 100lbs due being tired and having been out of the gym so long).  I gave myself around 30s between lifts, and rotated through BP->LP->Military Press-> back to BP.

Considering taking an hour long Basic Bag class tommorrow, and maybe sticking around for a KM class.

End result is that despite eating quite a bit more than normal, I'm down 6lbs and at my low point when just dieting.  Unlike weight loss with dieting, though, this weight will come back quickly... and it's easy to "justify" a trip to Shipleys with "I'm about to do an hour of swimming".  Even drinking Gatorade/Powerade will wreck the weight loss for the day... been sticking to strictly water in the workouts.

Post swimming lunch has been a couple of double cheeseburgers from McD's and a bacon ranch salad (no chicken), and dinner has been a couple of double Whataburger Jr.'s (toss the bun).  Not exactly healthy, but it seems to be working.

Depressingly, my performance hasn't been improving noticeably during these past few weeks of high intensity exercise, and like I said weight loss just ain't happening (although I chalk that up to muscle gains).  Even flat-out full speed, my time for 100m in the pool is at best 2:15s (which is absolutely poor) and started off at 2:20s.  I've been doing some research on aerobic training that is counterintuitive to what I was expecting and I'll go over that in the next post.

But I'm still happy with the progress made thus far.

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