07/01/2011
How do you know when you’re tired? How often should you rest? When is it time to take a break?
Ian answered this once for me that, he said that I should check my heart rate when I wake up in the morning, and if my heart rate is 5-10 bps above my normal then it’s definitely time for rest.
Most trainers and fitness professionals don’t seem to know, they all tell you it’s subjective. I think for me it’s time to take a rest when I start watching the clock. That just tells me that my intensity has dropped to the point I no longer care about the quality of the exercise but about the amount of time doing the work.
This morning’s session with Ali was awful. If last week was uninspired work, this one was desperation work. I was desperately trying to just withstand the work for an hour. I just couldn’t get the juice together, and my mind was someplace else.
It started with a quick warm-up on a treadmill walking for 10 minutes raising the incline at the start of each minute, and reaching level 18 incline on the 10th minute. I felt loose, yet my body lacked any power, I just felt weak.
He had me start with a few chest exercises including one that enjoy which involves getting on my knees, taking a medicine ball and using a chest pass to throw it to Ali. After I throw the ball I have to drop down to a push-up position and then get back up and catch the ball repeating the process for whatever number of reps he tells me to throw.
When we finished the chest warm-up he had me put on boxing gloves, so we could get my heart rate up. Once I had thrown about 8 punches my combinations had no spark or pop. It was as if I was still sleeping, or had already been through 3 workouts before I started with Ali. He actually made fun of me for my lack luster punching.
The last thing we did on chest after the boxing was to try and lift 1 heavy set doing dumbbells and straight bench. I was able to do 5 reps with 80 lbs dumbbells, and then I did 2 reps of 185lbs on the bench press. This may have been my only saving grace for the entire hour.
In the final 30 minutes of the session we moved from the TRX, to doing many, many planks, variations of crunches and leg lifts, Turkish get ups, and other fun agility exercises which always make me feel so…fat. In retrospect I had two moments of grace today, the first was the max out benching, and the second was doing 1 minute of Roman Chair Leg Lifts. Another milestone passing the remedial stages.