Day 10

DVD - Plyometric Cardio Circuit

Something interesting happened with my motivation today. It was a rough day on a personal level at the office, and in the past when I've had days like this I've found it difficult to workout. It's not so much that I have trouble motivating myself to start. It's that I get derailed by my thoughts part way through. My previous workouts were less of a rotation of DVDs - either a single disc with several 15-minute workouts you can configure how you like to do 30 or 45 minutes, a single disc with a 52 minute workout comprised of short 3 - 5 minute segments, or 2 or 3 discs. I get bored with them after a while. At that point if something is bothering me when I start, my mind will wander and before I know it I'm standing in the middle of the room replaying scenes in my head like I'm working my way backward through a movie to understand what happened, often berating myself for my shortcomings, real or perceived. Sometimes I can do the mental gymnastics to talk myself into and through the workout knowing I'm not in the mood, but often enough that isn't the case.

Today I was able to do the mental gymnastics and channel that blah feeling into energy to better myself in the way I want. The derailing never happened. In fact, once I started, the workout is so hard and requires so much of my focus to push through that I didn't think once about my day. My thoughts were more like a continuous stream of "Move. Move. Breathe. Move. Breathe. Move. Breathe. Holyfuckingshitthisishard. Move. Breathe" Part way through my thoughts weren't being formed in words anymore. "Breathe" turned into thinking of the sound that corresponds to "sharp intake of breath" with breathing followed by the "whew" sound of blowing air out in short spurts. "Ah-whew. Ah-whew. Ah-whew."

One of the things Shaun reminds you to do while doing the workout is to check your heart rate at the end of a max interval. They want to make sure you aren't going to blow out your heart. I hadn't actually done it until tonight. I don't have a heart rate monitor, so I had to make do with the old "take your pulse for 10 seconds and then multiply by 6" method, which is imperfect but will give you a good idea. They say when working out to this workout, your heart will be pumping at 85% of its max capacity, in what is called the "anerobic zone". Depending on level of intensity of movement, the BPM max changes.

For my age, at rest, my heart rate should be below the range of 93 - 95 BPM. During my 10-second measure, I counted 31 beats. 31 X 6 = 186. This puts me in the Red-Line limit for my age and level of exertion at the end of each warm-up and the end of the max interval circuits, which means that even after I stop working out, my body is going to be pulling from my stores of fat to replenish my muscles. For up to 48 hours. Since I don't go 48 hours without a workout on this plan, if the science is right, I'm burning fat pretty constantly. That's awesome! There are other benefits, too: increased cardiovascular health, increased lung function, increased speed.

I'll be checking my body measurements this coming Sunday, so at that point I'll have some idea how this is working for me. I won't be doing a weigh-in (I don't have a scale).

To revisit the food subject of yesterday's blog entry, today I was unable to eat at my 10:30 feeding due to a meeting, and somehow I made it all the way to the 1:30 pm meal time without getting hungry. I didn't incorporate all of he calories from 10:30 to my 1:30 meal, but I did add a little blue cheese to my salad and grabbed an extra piece of fruit. Funny how your stomach acclimates to the amount of food you give it regularly ... just like your body acclimates to your level of activity.