13 May, 2012

P90X Day 16: Plyometrics

Happy Mother’s Day!

Today is not only day 16 of P90X, but another personal milestone for me. Today marks 140 days straight that I have done some sort of work out. For those keeping score, that’s 20 weeks. When I started, I didn’t think I’d make it 20 days. After all, I never had before.

Like yesterday, and the rest of the week, today’s motto is:

Bring It!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m struggling a bit with the cardio workouts.

I keep mentioning that I’m trying to get my heart rate into the desired range. Here’s a handy chart:

The base formula for Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) is 220 – AGE. For me, that’s 175. For an anaerobic workout, you want to be consistently between 80-90% of that number. That’s 140-157.5. Now, this is just an approximate number. It also depends upon your resting heart rate. If your resting heart rate is very low, getting up to 150+ may be difficult. If your resting heart rate is very high, you may want to go up past 150, a little bit. But talk to your doctor first. Don’t just assume you should be going for 200. That’s almost certainly too high, no matter what your resting rate is.

For me, my resting heart rate is a tad on the high side, so I feel like I should be at about 150-165 to get me “in the zone”. I can definitely tell when I’m in that range for a while. It “feels” a lot different than just 140-150 would, but in a good way. I don’t really know how to describe it. But after a while of doing cardio, you’ll know the range you should be in to be getting the most out of it.

Anyway, on the cardio workouts, I keep checking my rate and I’m in the 130s, maybe low 140s. And I know that’s not good enough for me. Today, I pushed it more. I made sure to lunge a little lower, jump a little higher. I made sure my form was better than it had been on previous plyometric workouts. Result? I was in that 150-165 zone pretty much from beginning to end of the workout. And man, did it wear me out. And I was drenched in sweat when it was over. But it felt good too. I even hit 180 very briefly. 180 is too high, even for me, but it’s probably ok for a few seconds. Double time jump tucks did it to me. Remind me next time to maybe slow those down just a bit.

So, two days in to week three, and this has been the hardest and most rewarding week yet. I’m almost sad that next week the entire workout cycle changes. But I am enjoying P90X more and more every day. Much more than I thought I would.

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