Day 4 : Weights to finish

I was working from home today, which would normally afford me a cheeky lunchtime bikeride. Today I thought I could get some gardening done, we went to the park in the evening, and I cleared the kitchen and mopped the floors. All of this I thought would make a meaningful contribution to the days' target. Sadly not, and once again, found myself at that time of 10ish pm with over 130 calories to get rid of, using weights.

 Still, this is what this challenge is about - pushing that little bit extra when ordinarily I'd be heading to bed with the reasoning "sleep and recovery are really important, so I should really be getting my head down".

 So, heading off to the garage, I got some INJA drum and bass on, and just repeated chins, pressups, bicep curls, tricep extensions. It seemed to take forever. Again, I'm not 100% sure how the activity rings are calculated, but I don't want to game the system (yet!), so I kept at it. It's still hard, and often I over-estimate how much I can do on a set... pick the weight up "yeah, I can do 10 reps" but then get to about 6 and there's nothing there. I suspect that there's a lot of growth to be done there... again, that's why I'm doing this!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 2018 - Complete the Circles : Intro and Days 1-3

Having read up about a bunch of different 30 day challenges, I thought I'd take one on. The first one is relatively simple, and one that I'm pretty confident I can hit. These blogs are going to document how they go, what benefits and difficulties I got from them, and at the end, a summary of whether I'd do them again, incorporate them into my lifestyle, or whether I even completed them! I'm going to be a bit forgiving on myself, in that if I miss a day's challenge, I'll carry on with it and give the challenge a score out of 30. The challenges will be a combination of physical and mental, kind of like a protracted Crystal Maze... I've got a full time job, family commitments and whilst I wouldn't describe my social life as ravin' mental, there's always lots of fun stuff in the diary. The challenges will have to fit round those... So; to July's 30 day challenge :  Complete the Activity Rings on my Apple Watch. Now this should be doa...
Read more

Day 30 : Finale and review

Image
The last day was a pretty straightforward lunchtime run.  What have I learnt overall? Well, the challenge was mostly over July there - so it seems it's not made me do more per se than the previous month. That said, the rings completion occurred 5 times more than it did in June, so the effort was more evenly spread. I'm definitely feeling more energetic and healthy, but I think that the rings are only part of that. The complete picture includes things like how stressful work is (not especially at the moment, which is nice), how much sleep I'm getting (I'm getting plenty, although it's very much feast and famine - I tend to get 8, 6 or 4 hours, depending on whether it's a quiet night, a busy night, or a party!) and what the diet is like too... to have all those as metrics would maybe be a little too much effort to realistically record day in day out. I liked the weights workouts, where I had to keep lifting weights until the ring was complete. This...
Read more

Day 11 : Commute by Bike

Always massively satisfying... Riding in to work clears out both the 2 hardest circles of "Active Calories" and "Minutes Exercising" before I hit my desk. Today I didn't really push it on the bike, since I need to be able to do it every day and don't want to make things difficult for me tomorrow / later on. Fitness advice tells me that rest and recovery is as important as training, but I'm pretty sure that Pro athletes (admittedly, I'm not one of these guys!) train every day, so there's surely something to be said for it! The general trend with this challenge seems to be that the bike is the easiest way of achieving the challenge... which is either 'gaming the system' a bit, or just that the challenge has encouraged me to get on my bike more than I otherwise would have. Definitely true of Sunday night, when I was hungover, sweating and had to stay in. Horrible. Days like today though, when the weather's good and I'm riding ...
Read more