I spent my morning at work, preparing for the weekend. Around lunch time I drove to my parents place to pick up my mother for her physical therapy.
We arrived at physical therapy clinic a few minutes before her appointment was supposed to start, and they allowed my mother to go back early and get warmed up on a recumbent bike. Her knee is still very swollen so trying to use a bike is difficult, and seems to be painful.
My experience with physical therapy companies thus far in my life is shit. I don’t know how this industry can be considered health care. While my mom warmed up on the bike, the therapist was finishing up with another “patient”, and kept my mom on the bike 10 or 15 minutes into her appointment. Yes these morons had my mother pedaling a bicycle for more than 10 minutes, this from the same people who have told her not to spend more than 5 minutes on her feet at any given time, not to mention it made up about 1/3 of the time they spend with her, during the entire of the warm up the therapist paid no attention to my mother, if I hadn’t been there to say hey dummy come over here and pay attention to the current patient she would have kept talking to the other patient whose session was now running into my moms.
To further exasperate the situation she would tell my mother to do an exercise, say 2 sets of 15 of a leg lift and walk away. What the fuck? My personal trainers who make a fraction of what these people do monitor the work to make adjustments to what they prescribe, furthermore I’ve found that with the swelling that occurs it help to rub my hand over my mom’s knee, I think the sensation of my hand moving back and forth somehow provides relief from the throbbing around the swollen knee. Something I’ve seen other therapist do, and you would have no idea if it was necessary sitting behind a desk doing other shit.
Also as a professional how the hell do you cater the session to the present ability of the patient if you aren’t monitoring what’s going on. She repeatedly would tell her to do an exercise and walk away, talk to the other therapist, and basically yenta it up. After three other exercises she says okay you are all done, and gets an ice pack to ice her knee. What the fuck, 10 minutes of inattentive warm-up, and 18 minutes of therapy, and 15 minutes of ice, and these fuckers are going to bill my insurance company probably some ridiculous amount of money.
If I wasn’t directly involved with her therapy at home, she would never rehab. I am going to use the weekend to try and find a more professional therapy company. This is the second company we have worked with, and both companies have shown a complete lack of focus. One of the issues we have is that my parents are fully covered under our company’s insurance policy, but they also have Medicare, and the way the legislation is written because of the size of our company Medicare takes primary position in paying for services. What ends up happening when we choose a higher quality facility which doesn’t accept Medicare, the two insurance companies get into a pissing contest and start pointing the finger at each other that the other party is supposed to pay. What ends up happening is I then have to get involved in brow beat one of the fuckers into accepting and pay for the services.
After her session I had lunch with her, my sister, and brother in-law. We ate at a restaurant that I used to love, it’s a Korean Noodle place that serves dishes which are inspired by Chinese food, but prepared for the palates of Korean people. They have lots of yummy dishes which don’t have noodles; one of my favorite ones is a type of fried chicken wing, with a sweet and spicy sauce.
For some reason of course my mother has a hankering for this dish, so she ordered it, along with it we ordered a seafood veggie medley which has a wasabi based sauce. Most of what I ate was the seafood dish, which is great, and not at all greasy, but I did have 2 of the chicken wings, I couldn’t help it. It was so good. I mean so, so, so, so, good. Why does fried shit just taste better, I think you could fry my wet gym socks and it would taste like pumpkin pie.
I was able to walk away from this place without overeating, and still enjoying a little bit of something that I truly miss.
When lunch was finished, I dropped my mom off at her house, went back to work for a few hours, and then headed to the gym. I initially had a single personal training session set up with Ali at 4:00 PM, but I ended up doing two back to back sessions with him, and then I did an hour of cardio.
4:00 PM session. My first workout with Ali was focused around boxing. We started with a series of 3, and 4 punch combinations. I was trying to not only hit the pads with lots of power, but transition quickly. Just picture a fatter Floyd Maywether. In essence the boxing was the steak of my workout, and all other actives were the mash potatoes, and asparagus.
During this session I spent time on the TRX doing chest presses, and tricep extensions. I am starting to enjoy the TRX because of my ability to get a full range of motion while basically hanging from the ceiling. We also did quite a bit of movements for the legs including lunges, and jump squats.
The four o’clock workout was focused on heart rate intensive activtes which incorporated resistence training.
5:00 PM Session. From the 4 PM session we rolled right into the 5 PM session. The first 30 minutes of round 2 was in spent doing activities similar to round 1, but without any boxing. The second half hour we slowed down the tempo and focused on doing some heavy lifting for the chest and back.
This is the first time I’ve lifted heavy with Ali, and he sort of lit up like a kid who just got a new toy. On the flat bench we did barbell presses first with 50 lbs doing 12 reps, then 65 lbs doing 12 reps, and finally with 70 lbs doing 2 sets of 8 reps.
The dumbbell chest presses were superset with dumbbell rows, but what was different was that sometimes he would have me do one side at a time, and others he would have me take a lighter weight and do both sides together. For the back he also had me do lat pulldowns, pyramiding the weights going from 4 reps to 8 reps to 12 reps and then back down.
What was also a little unique in his heavy lifting session was doing work which focused on the negative resistance. For instance after the dumbbell bench press, we moved a smith machine. On the smith machine we put on 135lbs, and I started by doing 5 reps, then I would bring the bar down and only come up half way, and then back down and do a full rep. Then on the second rep I would come down and come back up half way twice, and then a full rep. I followed this pattern up to 6 reps. He then had me do 10 reps where it would take me 10 seconds to lower the bar. I found this difficult, and on the final two reps my chest wanted to give out.
From the smith we moved the hammer strength machine which mimics a seated row. Again he had me choose a lighter weight, 45lbs on each side, and had me do rows, but Ali added resistance by pulling on the bar in the opposite direction. It was like trying to pull something which was stuck, I had to use my feet to dig into the foot rest to get more leverage. He then had me bring the handles to the up position so my back muscles were fully engaged and started to hang on the bar and told me to not let him pull it down. I felt like some cheesy action hero in a cliffhanger moment, trying to prevent my friend from falling who’s telling me to just let him go, only in this case Ali is telling me not to let him pull me down.
6:00 PM Cardio Session. When I finished my second personal training session with Ali I was tired, I could feel my eyes closing. I packed up all my stuff to go home, and changed into my final clean shirt. I hesitated for about 10 minutes, playing a game of should I or should I go home. In the end the fact that it was Friday, and I hadn’t done cardio in two days won, and I ended up doing a session of treading.
Treading started at an incline level of 20, and resistance of 100 on the Arc Trainer. The first 6 minute cycle of high intensity was a huge mental battle because part of me had already gone home. All of the recovery periods were spent at a resistance level of 40, and incline of 10. Once I reached the last minute of recovery from the treading cycles, I ramped the machine back up onto full again and went for another 5 minutes. Once I finished this final 5 minute cycle of full incline and resistance, I recovered for 5 minutes, did finished the session with 3 sprints.
It has been a long week, and the need for incorporating more rest is apparent. This level of high intensity workouts is not sustainable, because it is starting to affect my ability to work my job. High cognitive thinking is not at an all time high. This weekend will be spent getting rest, possibly some stretching, but really a chance to rethink the workout plan.
I just hope the scale is kinder to me on Sunday. I am happy about my ability to finish the week strong, and that I didn't punt my final cardio session of the week. As tired as I was, I think innately, I knew how much of a win that last treading session would be for reinforcing my dedication.