Tag Archives For: yoga

14 Aug, 2012

Fitness Tuesday

/ posted in: Fitness

Wednesday

I’ve been telling myself I’m going to do yoga on the days I don’t do CrossFit in order to stretch more. I’m getting tight from all the lifting. Today I actually did it. My plantar fascitis was acting up. Downward facing dog helps that a lot. Actually, I think downward facing dog can probably fix most of what ails ya but when you are hurting it hurts to just think about doing it.

I started with sun salutations and then did a lot of transitions from plank to down dog to stretch the bottom of the foot. I’d hold each for a few breaths. Then I did lunges with the bad foot back. Laying on my back with a band around my foot and holding my leg up and then extended out to the side helped also. I felt a lot better.

Thursday

Holy Freakin’ Ab Day!

We did the warmup and then some strength work (snatches and presses) and then we did GHD situps. That’s sitting on the machine that allows for 270 degrees of upper body movement. I’ve never gone down that far. But today we had to do a sit up with an 8 second count down and 8 seconds up. That gave me enough time to really test my range of motion. I didn’t go backwards the full 270 but I got past 180. I have a fear of falling backwards so I need to learn to trust that my feet are locked into the machine and I’m not going to fall. We did three sets of 8 of those which was just cruel when you see what the workout was.

4 rounds of:

25 wall balls – take a medicine ball from the ground, squat, stand up and throw it against the wall up over your head

50 sit ups

I set up my station with one of the light medicine balls. It was 10 lbs. The thing is that once you start the workout you don’t necessarily have a claim to the equipment you set out. Everyone had their eye on the two lightest medicine balls. I did my first set with it and then it was always in use when I was ready for it again. I ended up doing a lot of reps with the 14 lb ball. That doesn’t seem like a big difference but it is huge over the course of a workout! I would do like 15 reps with the heavy one and then the light one would open up and I’d run across the gym to finish with the lighter weight. I did the workout in 17:22.

Sunday

I hadn’t fully recovered from Thursday. My abs were the sorest on Friday and Saturday. It hurt to laugh or do anything.

We started this morning with a 1/2 mile run. Then I picked a workout. It was only for 15 minutes but it was a long 15 minutes.

100 meter sprint – which dwindled to a shuffle on the last rep when I tried to make it last 2 minutes but failed

6 Curtis P’s – I don’t know who this person is but he’s obviously a sick person to have these named after him. Pick up a bar and hold it at your thighs. Curl it to your shoulders while squatting, stand up and do a lunge on each leg, then press it overhead. That’s one rep. As an added bonus, once you pick up the bar you can’t put it down until all 6 reps are done. After much deliberation about how bad we expected this to be several of us decided to only use the 33 lb bar for this move. This was wise.

12 pushups

I did 3 full reps plus the run and 1 curtis P move in 15 minutes. I dawdled on the last run because I didn’t want to do more lifts. They were rough.

Tuesday

My butt was seriously sore from Sunday’s workout. So, of course, I wander into the gym this morning and in the place on the board where it normally lists what strength moves we are going to do, it says 1.5 mile run. I haven’t run that far in a long time. I didn’t even know what pace to go out to be able to finish it. I went slow. I finished it fine but it was super slow. The problem with that is that since I was running with someone else slow and we were the last ones back, everyone else was there cheering for us. That meant we couldn’t cut through the parking lot at an angle to shave off a little distance. I stuck with the other person but I think in retrospect that I could have gone faster.

Then we had the workout. It was as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of:

5 pull ups

10 push ups

15 squats

I did 12 rounds plus the pull ups and 5 push ups.

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I’m going to do a fitness and nutrition challenge from Sept – Nov. It is called the Whole Life Challenge. You don’t have to belong to a gym to do it. On Sept 15 you take your measurements and do a workout. Then you self report your progress on nutrition and fitness every day. On November 10 you measure and do the workout again to see your progress.

The nutrition part is going to be the hardest for me. It is very restrictive especially for a vegetarian but I’m going to try. Any one else want to play? All the details are on the website.

07 Feb, 2012

CHECKpoint

/ posted in: Fitness

My fitness goals for last week were:

1. Set up my yoga space.

Didn’t happen. I tried but unpacking my sewing room was complicated by the fact that I found out that part of my fabric had been dumped into boxes instead of being kept in bins. Much harder to put away so that’s not done yet but I made a temporary space that will work for now.

2. Run two times

Happened – One time I ran 1 mile and walked a mile and the other time I ran 1.5 miles and walked 1 mile. I also went for a 2 mile walk with the SO.

3. Do yoga twice

Happened – I did a 1 hour shoulder opening class and a 1 hour hip opening class from yogatoday.com. The shoulder class was the free class this week.

Goals for this week

1. The same ones as last week

2. Go to a fitness class on Wednesday

3. I’ve been being more meticulous about what I eat and I want to keep that up when I’m at the new house.

13 Sep, 2011

Working Out

/ posted in: Fitness

I found a park with trails by a lake and a river to walk on at lunch time. They don’t go very far but it works for a short break.

I am totally confused by my running situation. Last year I worked really hard at trying to be able to run and totally sucked at it. This year I am much better without even trying.

I haven’t run far because my shoes are old and worn out and are killing my feet. I have new ones ordered. The other day I did two half mile runs with about a quarter mile walk in between. Today I ran three quarters of a mile with really no trouble. I’m not looking at times or anything so I don’t know if I’m faster or slower than what I was doing last year. I know I’m still not fast but I’m not trying to be. I’m going slow so I can do the distance easily. I just think the whole thing is weird but I’m not going to argue about it if my body suddenly is able to run.

I also found the Yoga Today website. There is a free membership where you can watch the class of the week and you can download hour long yoga classes for $3.99. There are classes for all different yoga styles and levels of ability. I tried one of the free weekly classes. It was for hip opening. You know when you are doing a class and the instructor says something that you think, “I must of heard that wrong because that’s physically impossible!” and you look up and realize that they are doing the physically impossible? That was happening here. About the eighth time I fell over I decided that maybe I wasn’t up to that level yet. But I did find I nice Kundalini shoulder opener class that was very nice. I haven’t looked around a whole lot because I know I could rack up quite the download bill.

27 Jan, 2010

Best. Day. Ever!

/ posted in: Fitness

There is a thing called TMI Tuesday or Thursday, I can’t remember which. Since I can’t remember I’m splitting the difference and posting on Wednesday. You’ve been warned…

As part of my last gynecologist visit I had a full STD panel. An astute observer might point out that it is a bit late since I’ve been in a monogamous relationship for almost 2 years but we were being complete. I mean, imagine that conversation with the SO at this point, “Um, honey, whoopsie?” I didn’t expect to find anything but when I got the call today that I was clear I was absurdly proud. I wanted to go bouncing around telling total strangers that I didn’t have AIDS (yeah, yeah, I know, HIV, but it didn’t have the same ring in my addled brain). It wasn’t like I had done anything special besides being very lucky in my choices of sex partners but still. It needed celebrating. I wasn’t sure how to blog it and figured I probably shouldn’t put it as my newest Facebook status. I called my sister-in-law.

Me in super-perky voice: Hi. I don’t have AIDS!
Her, without missing a beat: Congratulations!!!!

That’s what I wanted to hear. Someone as insanely perky as I was feeling. If I hadn’t gotten her I would have had to have called my mother and it just wouldn’t have been the same.

But then, then, I came home and decided to do a hip opening sequence yoga podcast. In all my years doing yoga I’ve been frustrated (which is a very non-yoga feeling) about my inability to do the very basic and fundamental pose downward facing dog.

I just can’t get my heels to touch the ground. I have the most super tight hamstrings in the world. I was doing about the sixth repeats of downward dog and felt something brush my heel. I thought that was odd since Riley is outside. I looked at my heels and …… THEY WERE TOUCHING THE MAT! Years and years of yoga and I haven’t been close. I don’t know what was different today than every other day but I’m going to take it. I came to that very Zen understanding after I analyzed my posture because my first thought was that I must have screwed up somewhere else since it was impossible for me to do it right which is also a very bad yoga attitude. That was when I decided that this seriously was the Best. Day. Ever!