So this is the interval workout that I'm doing that I talked about yesterday, I guess I've been popping these in for the past three weeks? Since the DDD bout and since Posh and Berg got raptured and it looked like I was going to have to step up to jam.
What you need for this workout:
a confederate
space to run
a resistance band or bike tube
an interval timer
and don't forget your water bottle
The sweetie man is my confederate, we go out to the schoolyard behind our house. Last summer we used a bike tube for this, and the sweetie man learned why not to be competitive when you are on the other end of an elastic tube attached to a person running hard and little bit mad in the other direction, that sucker snapped and, you know, it was a bike tube, it had the metal nozzle still attached, which whanged him and cut a little smiley face on his chest. I have since cut all the nozzles off my supply of bike tubes, but now we use a rubberbanditz. Pictured is the medium, but he thinks we could go up to heavy or robust.
So basically we go out, I warm up and then we do the workout. He puts the band around my chest and nicely cooperates to give me enough resistance to make it hard to run against, but not so much to make it impossible. We do a classic tabata, 20 seconds on and 10 seconds off. Though I do my 10 seconds as active rest, meaning I keep my legs moving in slo mo.
Forward:
Lateral:
Pictures of food and inanimate objects I take, pictures of me the sweetie man takes, so who took these pictures. Dawn did, thank you Dawn.
Now a tabata is supposed to be you do eight rounds for four minutes, and you're done for fat burning. The first time we went out, that's what I did and then two days later I jammed against Second Wind and was out of gas halfway through the first half. I honestly don't fear getting the crap beaten out of me, I fear being too tired to do anything about it. That's some serpent and rainbow shit. Fat burning, shmat burning, what I need is to be able to explode all out for up to two minutes, rest for maybe two, three minutes, and then be recovered enough to do it again, over and over, for an hour. I'm not going to get there with a four-minute workout. So I increased my rounds to four, with four minutes total rest sucking on my water bottle in between. That's just about thirty minutes total, so that gets me at least to halftime. And actually, I have been jamming entire scrimmages since then. We shall see, Golden Bowl coming up.
Warmup
1 lap walk
1 lap light jog
1 lap brisk jog
ROM series, 10 reps ea
Workout
20 sec forward drive
10 sec active rest
20 sec lateral drive right
10 sec active rest
20 sec forward drive
10 sec active rest
20 sec lateral drive left
10 sec active rest
...repeat 1x
Rest 4 min
Repeat 3x
Cooldown
3 laps walk
light crying
Some notes:
- You don't need me to tell you that you have to do this all out, do you? There's nothing to be gained from holding back here. If you can't make it through all four rounds, even if you can't make it through one round, AWESOME, you have worked up to your limit. That's how you push your limits! Next time you will push farther.
- There's also nothing to be gained from a floppy core, keep it engaged even though it's more tiring like that. If you feel yourself flagging and not picking up your legs, at the very least engage your core—squeeze butt, tighten abs, set shoulders—and then, force yourself to pick up your legs another few steps. You're never that far away from the end of twenty seconds.
- Note in the pics, I am not pumping my arms. This is because I am training myself to drive with my arms down to avoid penalties and also the better to squeeze into tight spaces. I will probably further adapt this drill to train myself to drive with my torso turned to squeeze into the aforementioned tight spaces.
- For the lateral drives, the sweetie man keeps me honest about driving straight to three or nine o'clock. You want to train pure lateral movement off skates, because on skates all your wheels do is pull you forward and any lateral movement is all about muscle.
