A Good Week

I had a great week last week at the box.  I didn't really do anything spectacular ... in fact I kept my weights fairly low (okay, maybe not too low as I realised when I got home to log my workout that I equalled my 1RM for strict press) but I really enjoyed my training last week.  It was bizarre as each day I felt like I was dragging my feet to the gym but once I got in there I really got a lot out of it.

I am trying to focus on improving my muscle endurance as I know I fatigue easily in metabolic conditioning workouts and at the moment it is better for me to lower the weights and get more reps.  Often this means I need to leave the ego at the door and not to compare with the other girls at the gym.  It is often easy for me to look around the room and think, 'if she is lifting that weight, then I should be too.'  Sometimes this has pushed me in the right direction and at times I achieve weights that I wouldn't have otherwised tried but I also need to look at the bigger picture and there are times that I need to step back to move forward and maybe by working on endurance the strength will follow in time. 

Mind you, I get it wrong every now and then and I under-scaled in one of the workouts last week.  I tend to do that in team WODs as I don't want to let my partner down.  We used bands to assist us in our pushups (we had to 3 sets of 40) but in hindsight I maybe should be tried full pushups as it was way too easy.  I also chose to do 20 full double unders rather than the 80 required reps.  Normally I do attempts so I still count failed double unders but I think I need to focus on getting it right rather than accepting failure.  In hindsight, I should have perhaps done 40 full ones as I got the 20 relatively easily.  Double unders are tricky for me because I either get them or I am really, really bad at them and can barely get 1 rep out and, if I lose them, it's always in the middle of a WOD.

I'm also working on consistency in my workouts.  Yesterday's WOD was our box's version of Fight Gone Bad.  It involved:

3 Rounds, AMRAP

1 min KB swings
1 min up and over box jumps
1 min pull ups
1 min overhead squats
1 min plate burpees
1 min rest

I was happy that my scores for each round were 89, 87 and 87.  It is easy to go all out in the first round and die in subsequent rounds, for me these types of workouts are about pacing myself and try to maintain the same level throughout each round.  Granted I selected the 8 kg KB which my back thanked me for, I did step ups for my box jumps as there was no room to set up my plates, and I did front squats instead of OHS which, again, my back thanks me for ... but I'm not saying "yeah, but I scaled anymore" because I still worked bloody hard.  For me, this workout highlighted the fact that I really need to work on my kipping pull ups because this is what slowed me down.  I can't keep doing strict if I want to get high numbers.

Wow, I really rambled on today ... should go do some work I guess :)