Day 4 - Yoga

Time sucks. I was hoping to catch up today, but the first chance I got to do Legs and Back was 9:30 and then Cam started crying and Steph was in the shower, so I ended up nixing it. I did my Hummingbird Yoga, which is lucky. I ended up with 30 rushed minutes of free time today. Cripes.

Day 3 - Shoulders and Arms

Today, I put off working out out of simple priority shuffling. I had a lot to do and I let the workout slide to the bottom of the stack. I ended up getting home from the grocery store at 8, putting the kids to bed, and starting my workout at 9:20. At the same time, I was rebuilding an old server in my basement, so I was still multitasking until I went to bed. I was originally going to make up Shoulders and Arms from yesterday and then do Yoga, but I didn't have nearly enough time. I still think I want to do Hummingbird Yoga, but I have to figure out which day it's going to fit in.

The workout was good. I tried to push the weights as much as I could. There were a couple that I went too high on and failed in the 5-6 range instead of the 8-10 range, so I made the appropriate notes and will adjust accordingly next time. I didn't have time for abs, so I'll do them tomorrow and maybe Saturday with Kenpo.

Avatar

Yesterday was kind of hectic. I usually work from home, but on Wednesdays, I go into the office for meetings and a team lunch. I generally don't try to work out before I go in, although I am sometimes able to do it. I probably should've yesterday, but I didn't know I had a full date night as soon as I got home from work. I thought I would have from 4-6 to do something. Anyway, I got home from work and Steph's mom showed up a short time later. Steph and I were out the door a little after 5:00. We went to Qdoba and tried their new Craft 2 menu, which I loved. You get to pick two small-portion entreés for $5.99. There are a lot of choices and I went with Tortilla Soup (with Chicken) and a naked chicken burrito. It was exactly the right size. I'll be doing that again.

After that, we went to see Avatar 3D. Awesome. The story was cliché, but that was really secondary in this movie. The real star was the CGI, the culture and environment of Pandora, and the groundbreaking actor-driven graphics. I was really impressed. Well worth the $12 ticket, IMHO. I didn't get home until about 11:00, so I didn't do my Shoulders and Biceps workout, so today, I'll be doing that along with Yoga. I'm no fan of "long Yoga" so I may try Hummingbird from the 1-on-1 series. I've had it for awhile, but I've not gotten around to trying it.

Despite the fact that I didn't work out yesterday and went to the movies, I was only 5 calories over my target intake for weight loss.

Day 2 - Plyometrics

It's so effing cold in my basement, I don't want to do plyometrics first thing in the morning. I know it's over 32 degrees because there was a cup of water on my desk and it wasn't frozen, but it couldn't have been much higher than that. Anyway, I decided to do plyo after work today and not get suckered by anything that would make me skip it. I signed off at 4:00 and went strainght down to the cold basement.

I wasn't cold for very long. It was hard, as it always is after even a brief hiatus, but I got through it without a pause. I was sweating my ass off by the time I was finished and I forgot the basement was cold at all. I did peter out toward the end. The second round of jump shots didn't get my full-on explosive jump. It looked more like a token effort, but it felt like I was giving it my all. The football hero suffered as well. I wrapped it all up in time to get upstairs and sit down to dinner.

The New Year - Day 1 - Chest and Back

It's a new year and life has settled down quite a bit since I last blogged. I had several false starts and a couple of real starts in the last few months, but I never made it through the whole program. Once the holidays hit, I kept up with my workouts about 50% of the time, but my diet went to hell. Now that the calendar has clicked over to 2010 (I pronounce it twenty-ten) I need to start giving it my all again. I have considered going back to my BRE diet, which consisted mainly of chicken or fish coupled with brown rice and broccoli. On that diet, I LOST WEIGHT and GAINED MUSCLE. It was boring and I had to take in extra fat in the form of flax seed oil to meet my minimum fat requirement, but it was easy and it was brainless. Part of what gets me in to trouble is not being prepared. When you just try to eat well as a whole, you sometimes run out of stuff that's easy to prepare or you just don't want to take the time to prepare it and you end up eating something bad. When you have chicken and rice and a green leafy on hand all the time, temptation is much less of an issue. I also found that on the BRE diet, I was never hungry and the only time I had cravings for junk is if I (for any reason other than a craving) had some junk first. It perpetuates itself.

So anyway, I woke up this morning and had my egg/fat free cheese/wheat toast sandwich and a glass of milk with a Costco kids chewable dino vitamin chaser for breakfast. At lunch, I went to do the chicken thing and discovered the only chicken breasts I had ready were old. When I cut open the pouch, it smelled sulfurous like bad eggs. They went into a ziplock and into the trash. I dug around a little more and found some frozen salmon. It was in individual serving pouches. Perfect! I perforated the pouch with a fork and nuked it for three minutes and voila, salmon. A cup of brown rice and some Sriracha finished it off. While I was wolfing it down, I commented to Steph that I had no idea why I stopped eating like this. It was freaking delicious. It is perhaps one of my favorite meals. I ate this in front of my laptop while I worked by the fireplace. Heaven.

After lunch, I informed my teammates at work that I would be "going to the gym." I went to the frigid basement and did my P90X Chest and Back. I have had two weeks mostly off of working out, so I got a little dizzy when I was pushing to my max reps, but I made it through and felt much better afterward. A protein shake topped off the workout and let me know that I am almost out of creatine as well. I don't have anything else scheduled other than abs - which will not be Ab RipperX, but instead, The Truth About Six Pack Abs - Level 5 - but I hope to squeeze in some hill sprints. It depends on how I feel later on. I don't want to overdo it on the first day of my new commitment.

Round 2 Again

Well, I thought I could keep up my workout schedule while having a baby. Guess what? It didn't work. I was doing great and then the lack of sleep started catching up to me. I missed one workout, then two, then three, then four. Eventually, I was starting over every Monday with Chest and Back and it was the only workout I was doing except maybe an occasional Plyo. Last week was the first time I completed a week's worth of training, so I'm calling it week 1 of the new Round 2. Hopefully, this week will be as productive.

I'm still not getting any sleep. As a matter of fact, I took second shift last night on baby watch. We tried to outsmart the baby by going to bed at 9 because she often sleeps great from 8pm to 1am. Well, last night, she woke up at 9 and didn't go to sleep again until 7AM. I slept from 9 to 3 and then Steph slept from 3 to 7. Babies suck.

Today, I'm back to Chest and Back and, despite the fact that I just want to go back to bed, I'm going to try to get my workout done right before or right after lunchtime.

Day 17 - Shoulders and Arms

I had a long work day again yesterday and I didn't finish up until about midnight. That was far too late to do strength training, so I just went to bed.Today, I seem to be having a similar time, but I was able to do my workout in fits and starts throughout the work process. It took me two hours to do the routine, but I got it done. I don't have anything going on tonight, so maybe I can make up Yoga this evening. Historically, that has not panned out, but I did miss doing it last week, so maybe I will get up the gumption to drop 90 minutes of my evening on it.