The Fitness Ninja

My brother is trying an experiment with this blog.  He’s convinced me to move to a domain he’s registered and hopes to make some money with ads on a panel on the side.  Hope it works out… and that the advertisements aren’t too intrusive.  I dunno.  If it doesn’t work I guess I can always go back to this service.  It isn’t really a big deal to me but I think he’s using this as a kind of experiment to see how feasible it is.

As for my workout today, it went well.  I was super tired going into it because the baby was kinda extra fussy today.  Add to that the fact I am trying to keep up with housework and chores along with cleaning up after just baby stuff, I feel kinda run down by the afternoon.  Thank God my wife is here to help share the load (she’s amazing) as it makes things bearable (gotta give props to all those single parents out there doing it on their own).

I don’t really have much to say as I’m kinda half asleep right now.  I’ll check back in again tomorrow.

PS In getting back in my grease the groove system, I pumped out 75 weighted pull / chin ups yesterday (that’s total, not each).  Today I think I’ll only get 30-45 as I am so out of it.

Man… I am tired today.  As usual, still getting used to waking up every couple hours at night to feed the baby.  I think my wife and I are developing a system.  I do the first feed and change at like 1 or 2 then she does the second at 3 or 4.  At least this gives me a couple hours of sleep before I have to wake up in the morning to go to work (this is considering of course that I can get back to sleep… sometimes it just doesn’t come).

In any case, I puttered around the house after feeding and changing the baby this morning.  Going back to my grease the groove system.  Shoulder’s feeling much better after 2 days of rest.  I’m up to about 50 weighted pull ups for today and I still have the rest of the day left to go (it’s about 2:30 PM right now).  Hopefully, I can get to 80-100 by the end of the day.  I find wide front grip pull ups to be the hardest.  If I can get 5 down, I know the next 2 sets of chins and military pull ups will be fine.

Around noon I did Pure Cardio followed immediately by Cardio Abs.  Pure Cardio seems to be getting a touch easier.  I just learn to pace myself a bit near the start.  Still get burned down by the time the push ups roll around.  As for the ab work… man, even though it’s easier than ARX, I still stall several times during the C-pose section.  It strains my lower back and I have to straighten out especially during the leg lifts.  Gotta just hold on and push through it.

In other news… y’know I hardly ever watch TV but I’m getting so interested in an old HBO series called ‘The Wire’.  Friend was saying how good it was and I’ve seen a bunch of tribute videos to it on YouTube.  I really should pick up the first season and see how it goes.

Added another song to my workout set:

In more “other” news… all the orange frosted cookies are finally gone from my house! WOOHOO! Sister-in-law and her daughter came over and they finished them off thankfully (along with the help of my wife).  I have a real soft spot for cookies… and ice cream… and donuts… and chocolate.  Gotta keep that stuff outta the house in order to stay good.  I’m still eating apples regularly (I can stomach them now and the taste ain’t so bad) and I buy pineapples regularly as I love that for dessert (along with non-fat yogurt and granola).

Gotta remember the health rap… ironic that it’s Cookie Monster doing it.  Although he has been on a fitness kick lately as evidence by his interview with Matt Lauer.

Oh man… today was a rest day and yet I blew it.  It started out well enough eathing oatmeal for breakfast, a granola bar for snack, then soup, an apple and a small fat free yogurt with granola chunks for lunch.  Then I went to the groceries to buy some diapers and odds and ends for the family.  I bought a bag of chocolate chip cookies for my mother who came with me.  When she dropped me off at my house, she left about a half dozen cookies.  I had 4 of them.  Then some chicken stew and rice for dinner.  Friends came over and they bought more homemade cookies over! BLAAARGH!!!  They were orange flavoured and frosted.  So. Damn. Good.

Thank God I’m back to working out tomorrow.  Gotta burn these cookies off.  Also, I took today and yesterday off from my grease the groove system in order to let my shoulder knit itself back up.  It feels worlds better.  I’ll get back to it tomorrow.  Peace!

Oh man, up where I live in Southern Ontario winter has been pretty mild.  Just last week it was raining for several days turning everything here into a sloppy mush and flooding some of the towns north of where I live.  Today, however, is another matter entirely as the temperature seems to be moving into the double digit negatives *without* the windchill factored in (with the windchill it feels even more brutal).  We’ve pumped the thermostat to a healthy 72 degrees fahrenheit (I have no idea what that is in centigrade… I think like 22-23?) in order to keep everyone in here warm.  Having said that, the baby is safely bundled in several layers (one of them being a nice wool blanket).

As for my exercise, I dragged myself down into the basement around 12:30 PM to do Plyometric Cardio Circuit.  I was freezing at first (see above), but like all Insanity workouts, half way into the warm up I was fine.  By the end, as usual, I was drenched in my own sweat.  Hehe… I never remember sweating this badly for any of the P90x workouts except Plyo X and even then near the end of the 90 days Plyo X wasn’t so bad.  With Insanity, so much perspiration is coming off my face I feel like I can literally drink it in (ugh… that is a gross image).

Yesterday, I thankfully finally found a band for my glasses to help keep them stuck to my head during the workouts.  Very simple but it cost 4 bucks.  Now I need to get a good headband to prevent the whole “drinking sweat” problem I just talked about.  I also just got recently from a very nice co-worker 3 cases of the EAS Easy Whey Protein drinks.  It’s like 60 vials of 42 g of protein each in orange, grape and blueberry flavour.  Super sweet but with no sugar.  I dilute half of it in a glass of cold water and drink it down after a workout.  Kinda serves as my recovery drink followed soon after by a meal or snack of some sort (I’ve recently fallen in love with pineapples and black berries [nature's jube jubes], fat free yogurt and granola).  The other half I save for the following day.  This way I prolong each vial (gotta make every dollar stretch).

I think that’s it for today! Peace out and make sure to bundle up if you’re heading outside!

Gotta say this about the “grease the groove” system… you need to work in rest days for it.  Its strength is in its simple principle:  work out with low reps, high intensity, strict form and never to failure over and over again throughout the day.  Problem is you can still hurt yourself if you overdo it.  This might seem obvious, but I find the soreness creeps in very slowly because the sets are set so far apart from one another (like there might be an hour between my sets or just a couple of minutes depending on when I pass by the door with the chin up bar hooked up to it).  However, the day after you can really feel it if you pushed yourself to say over a hundred weighted chin ups / pull ups during the previous day.

I guess the reason I bring this up is because I can feel the soreness from the chinups in my shoulders and back (particularly near the lower base of my left shoulder blade).  I think I will refrain from the system on my rest days (Fridays) and probably only implement it every other day during rest week.

As for Insanity, I did my duty completing Cardio Power & Resistance late this afternoon when I came home from work.  One thing I will say about this program, as much as I love it, I could not see doing the full set over and over again during the course of a year.  It’s just too high impact and I worry about the wear and tear it puts on my joints despite constantly trying to land “like a cat” whenever I do heavy jump sets.  I can feel a slight twinge sometimes in my right knee… the same twinge I would sometimes feel after a long strenous run.  I’ll finish this system once as it was intended  just to say I did it then heavily modify it in future iterations.

Prior to my Insanity routine today I did a suitcase carry (that’s walking with a heavy load in one arm which you switch over to the other arm when you get tired) for about 20 minutes as I hauled a large heavy bag of groceries from the bus stop to my house.  Why did I do this? It’s because I take the bus to and from work and decided to stop by and pick up some essentials at the local Metro Food Mart after my shift was done.  Man… cans of pork and beans and soup and boxes of cereal never felt so damn heavy.  (Interestingly, if you carry a heavy load in each arm I believe it’s called a “farmer’s walk”.)

In other news, we gave Elias his first bath today.  Seems water is his kryptonite as he screamed like the devil were out to get him during the entire ordeal.  Poor guy.  But he has to be cleaned! We put a premium on hygeine in this household!

In other “other” news, some of my friends are hopping back on the fitness bandwagon after taking a small break over the course of the winter holidays when they went away on vacation in the Philippines.  In addition to attending the gym again, I think they are hoping to follow this “meal plan“.  I hope it works out for them!

My wife woke up this morning and realized she had a bladder infection.  So off she went to the clinic to get it checked out.

I, consequently, dragged my groggy butt out of bed to look after Elias.  He needed changing and so I placed him on the change pad mechanically going through the process of replacing his diaper.  No sooner did I take his old poopy one out and slip a new one under him when he decided to let loose a new stream of poop which seemed to go all over the place.  I quickly covered him up and MADE SURE to wait until he was done.  I slip a third new diaper in place and WHAT DO YA KNOW? He starts pooping AGAIN!  I was fast enough to get the old diaper back under him to catch it.  I just looked up at the sky outside the window in his roomed and asked “Why do you mock me??”

The wife returned and got some new antibiotics.  I cleaned up the house a bit making sure to wash old bottles we had used the night before.  At about 10 AM, my body decided I had had enough and needed to crash for a nap.  My wife woke me up again at 11 but I still couldn’t get out of bed to start working out.  Finally, at 12 I was able to crawl to the basement begin.

And lo and behold! It was CARDIO RECOVERY day! WOOOHOOO!  No killing myself doing sprints for 40 min.! What a pleasant surprise!  I now know this is Shaun T.’s answer to Yoga X.  I kinda like it better than Yoga X as it is MUCH SHORTER yet almost just as intense in certain parts (some of those pulses / poses are killer).  I don’t feel like a single moment is wasted and still have a half-decent sweat on even after just 30 min.  There’s a very good chance that I will do an Insanity / P90x hybrid after my pure Insanity program is over.  If so, I will definitely keep cardio recovery in the mix, probably swapping it in for Yoga X and putting it into the recovery weeks as well.  I like it that much.

Before signing off, take a look at the side bar at a new blog I’ve included in the blog roll: More Milk, Less Moo is a interesting read of a guy on a fitness kick in Japan.  I remember having lived and worked there for several years so I can kinda relate to a number of the topics he writes about.  Just a good blog altogether.

Peace out!

K… last night was pretty nutty.  Didn’t realize a baby could eat and poop so damn much.  Thankfully, he wasn’t much of a crier so he went back to sleep easily enough after feeding.  Crazy thing is our whole lives right now (and it’s only been a couple of days) seem to revolve around Eli’s eating and pooping schedule.  He has to eat every 3-4 hours and since it takes him between 30 min. to an hour to finish feeding properly and getting changed, it means by the time we actually lay him down to sleep again it’s only another 2 hours or so before we’re up at it again.

I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but we’re so tired that basically as soon as we lie down on the bed we are out of it.  We do set the alarm though just in case we overshoot his feeding time… of course this has not happened yet as he wakes before the alarm to yell at us to feed him.

I know this isn’t exercise related but… well, it’s what’s dominating my life at the moment.  And in many ways it’s impacting my attempt on Insan…

…

…

OMG… I just went to go help my wife put a onesy on Eli and he blasted us with pee.  It poured out of his diaper and onto my wife mainly.  I just got a dribble.  I then changed him and he had just taken a massive poop which he then tried to wiggle out of.

Where was I? Oh yeah… I feel so tired I really don’t want to do Insanity workouts.  But… knowing I have to write this blog and how disappointed I’ll feel if I skip, I just go downstairs and keep pushing play.  I finished Pure Cardio today then tacked on Cardio Abs.  Had to take a break during Cardio Abs as I feel so damn wiped from Pure Cardio.  It should improve over time, but knowing my luck by the time I get used to it, it will be time to move onto the Max workouts.  How in the world am I gonna get through the second month with a baby waking me up every 3 hours of the night?

Something to ponder.

At last! Elias’ is finally home!  We can finally stop going to the hospital 4-5 times a week … and instead stay up at ungodly hours of the night trying to feed and change his diapers! Hehe! It’s all worth it though.

After getting home from the hospital and eating lunch then changing poopy diapers (my first one in this house!), my mom decided to look after the baby for about 45 minutes as I tackled Plyometric Circuit.  I felt a little more sluggish doing it today as I was up kinda late last night doing some last minute fixing up of the house (or ‘nesting’ as my wife likes to call it… I rearranged all the cabinets in our room along with the linen closet so everything is more organized… also took out a bunch of old clothes to donate to the Salvation Army).

On another note, I upped my weighted backpack for my ‘grease the groove’ chin-up / pull-up system by 5 bringing the total weight to 15 lbs.  The following blog link has a nice excerpt from Pavel Tsatsouline’s book about weight training which explains the premise behind his concept.  I recommend giving it a read as it’s a great method of working out throughout the day without totally burning yourself out.

Click here for the link.

Alrighty… so I did the second fit test.  Scored much better than the first one as I know what to expect and I sped up my repetitions (still very mindful of form though).  One thing I do notice though is that Tanya is generally much faster than the other guy and that’s what’s netting her the higher rep count.  This seems obvious but … that guy (forgot his name) seems to also take several more pauses than Tanya in between reps and even DURING reps.  Like on Power Jumps he seems to hold himself for about 0.5 to 1 second in the squat position.  Maybe he’s recuperating from being winded? I dunno… I tended to do the power jumps like Tanya (aka like Bobbi doing the Jump Knee Tucks from P90x).  In any case here are my results (in the second column).

Hopefully, I can improve even if only by a few reps each test.

Switch Kicks

Power Jacks

Power Knees

Power Jumps

Globe Jumps

Suicide Jumps

Push-Up Jacks

Low Plank Obliques

Hey there folks,

Past couple of days have been super busy.  I’ve been travelling back and forth between the hospital and home running some errands and doing a bit of paper work on behalf of my wife.  Amazingly, I’ve been able to keep up with the Insanity schedule.  This past Wednesday I was able to come home for a few hours and so decided to do Pure Cardio (this routine is already a killer but on top of the lack of sleep it felt like torture… just bucked up and “dug deep”… got through it in one piece).  However, I did not have time to do the additional Cardio Abs routine.  So… upon returning home yesterday for an hour or so, I did Cardio Abs.  It’s not bad.  It’s no ab ripper X but I like the fact that it is so different from P90x’s core routine in that there are no crunches (Shaun T. supposedly hates them… forgot where I read or heard that) and instead a lot of plank work.  I used to do quite a bit of isometric abdominal work before P90x but found it tapered off once I started that 90 day routine.  I’m glad I’m back to it as I find it generally less stressful on the back.  However, those C-pose exercises do then to make my back sore…

Today is a rest day.  Yesterday, too, was technically a rest day as I only did Cardio Abs and none of the 40 minute videos.  That’s ok as I banked a rest day from last week in anticipation of the chaos that would happen this week.  It pays to think ahead (although if I were really thinking ahead, I probably wouldn’t have done back to back rest days as who knows when I’ll need an extra one in the coming weeks… Oh well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get there).

In other news, more than likely the baby is coming home to stay today from NICU! WOOT! It’s gonna be a whirlwind around here.  I’ll try my best to keep updating my progress daily but if I slack here and there forgive me!

PS Because I’ve been mostly away from home this past week, my grease the groove system has kinda hit the backburner.  On average I only do 30-50 pull / chin ups a day when I can squeeze it in on the trips home.  Still, using a 10 lb weight in my backpack.  Hope to up that to 12.5 or 15 in a week or so. Peace!