02 June, 2012

P90X Day 36: Chest, Shoulders & Triceps

Did I say this one might become my new favorite last week? No, surely not. It must have been Monday’s workout, Back & Biceps. Today’s was awful.

For the first time since I’ve started this thing, I wanted to quit. Don’t worry. I’m not going to, but I finally understood the people that do. This is a rough workout. To make matters worse, either I didn’t warm up well enough, or I pushed myself too hard on one of the early exercises.

I’m not sure which it was, but around the 8th exercise or so, both of my shoulders started to hurt pretty badly. Not in a good way. It went away after about 15 minutes, and I probably should have taken a break when it happened. Instead, I kept on with the exercises (never even pushed “pause”, and just tried to stretch a bit between exercises. Still, I’m sure that during that period, I was a little more tentative than usual.

And while I was going through this, I couldn’t help but think about tomorrow’s Plyometrics, and how hard that is. Yes, I was down for a bit. Can you tell? Still, I finished the workout, and I’ll finish tomorrow’s too. And the rest of the upcoming 50+ days as well.

Anyway, back to the workout. As I’ve mentioned last time, this is another workout with a lot of weights. And, since last time was the first time, I had a lot of trouble picking out the correct weights for the workout. I think I pretty much got the right ones now. I’ll find out next week. Which of course I’m really looking forward to, after today. Winking smile But, the only reason I was able to get the right weights even this time around was because of the worksheets. Tony repeats endlessly, “write down what you did”, and he means it. There’s not a lot of room on the worksheets, so you also need to come up with some sort of shorthand for any kind of additional notes.

For example, for a particular exercise, there might be a box with the following: R ____ W ____. You’re supposed to fill in your reps, and what weight you used. But I might put in something like R 10 W 20-. The 20- tells me that I used twenty pound weights, but for whatever reason felt like it was too heavy.  Maybe my form wasn’t good, or I realized 2/3 of the way through that I was doing them wrong. Whatever. There’s not enough room to put that kind of information in there, but there’s no way you’ll remember it after a week, and 100 other different exercises. But you don’t need to know the why. You just need to know that 20 pounds was too heavy.

I might also do just the opposite: R 10 W 20+. This helps me next week, too. Without the + there, I’d have a decision to make. 10 reps is at the top end of what I want to do for most of the exercises. So, if I see I did 10, should I increase the weight or not? The + tells me that I thought that I would be able to do that.

Finally, you know what’s coming, right? It was a strength day, which means Ab Ripper X at the end. Of course, this is the second time that I’d forgotten all about Ab Ripper. The workout finished, and I was cleaning up my weights, and I heard the music. My heart sunk. Still, nothing to do but grin and bear it. It’s only 16 minutes long, and I know it by heart by now. So, I know I can get through it.

And I did. But there’s no doubt. Today was definitely the day I enjoyed least of the 36 so far. Look on the bright side, though. It’s extremely unlikely that tomorrow can be worse. And I only have to do this particular workout three more times. I can get through it three times. I may hate it, but I can do it.

Plyometrics tomorrow. That will be followed by a quick trip out of town, so likely no update until the evening. Don’t worry, though. I’ll do the plyometrics first thing in the morning before I leave.

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