To Insanity and Beyond

Skip to my fit test results
I have to say that I am somewhat disappointed in my Fit Test results for Day 15 of my second round of Insanity. I had hoped to improve across the board and, as you can see, I pretty much did the exact opposite of that.

While I felt stronger toward the later workouts than I ever have before, you can see just by looking at my numbers that something was amiss in my workouts and I don’t know what it was. I woke up later than usual today, which usually gives me a better workout than when I try to get up early and do it. I felt more energetic and refreshed than normal, too.

Something that was different about today was that my entire family was awake with me. And my kids and wife were having all sorts of discussions which was hard for me to block out. Perhaps it was the distraction of the noise that had an impact on my performance? Whatever it was, I did considerably worse than I had two weeks ago.

But at least I have new goals for myself. And I have a new newfound desire to blow the lid off my stamina, strength and all of my numbers. We’ll see how that goes in 21 days when I take the Fit Test all over again.

And keep an eye out for some changes coming to the way I blog and what I blog about. I’m noticing that I seem less and less motivated lately than I ever was during my first round of Insanity. I refuse to lose that momentum so I am going to be setting some things up around here that will make sure I have something to help me focus on my health and fitness every single day.

Today’s fit test results

The end of week two, like the end of every week in Insanity, brings rest to your schedule. Take it and enjoy it.

Let your body recover from the pounding that it takes day in and day out. Let your muscles recoup, let your mind clear itself. Prepare yourself mentally for tomorrow, when it starts all over again, but take full advantage of today, when you should be doing nothing physical that exerts yourself like Insanity, or exercise in general, would.

Whoa baby, was today ever a great workout! I haven’t felt this good while exercising, or after an exercise, in a long time. I wish I could put my finger on what was different about this morning. The only thing I can think of is that I slept longer today and gave myself as much time as I needed to get moving after I woke up. I was up at about 6:30 and didn’t start to workout until about 7:15. I think giving myself that time was totally worth it to my routine today.

The warm up was really, really easy compared to past days. It seems every day I get more and more used to the warm up and that is leading me to not get the amazing cardio blast I used to get during the warm up. Still, it is doing its job as I am warmed up pretty good by the time the stretches come around. Today was a lot like that. I barely broke a sweat in the warm ups. I did start to feel warmed up during the stretching, but even then, it was not a crazy dripping sweat type warm up for me.

After the stretching was over we dove right into the exercises and I hit it hard. Of the fifteen exercises on today’s program I was able to do 13 of them without resting. The two that hammered me were Level 2 Drills and Push Up Jacks. I believe I was tortured by these two exercises the last time I did this program, but it was way worse during that program than it was today. I actually felt very accomplished today, and felt a lot closer to being able to complete an entire program by the end of week 4.

Cardio Abs was a little different. While I did lots better today than the last time I did an ab program, I was challenged today by the ab exercises. Still, I gave it my all and pushed through to the best of my ability and got a great ab workout from it.

I am really looking forward to the next couple of weeks. I want to see just how hard I can push myself in these next two weeks. I want to see if I can actually complete an entire program without resting. I know I can do it. It will be hard, but I know I can do it.

It seems that I am playing around more with weight loss technique than I am trying to actually lose any weight. Once again I had a weight loss, but once again it was a very small loss. And while I will never squawk at a loss, I am a little disappointed that it was as small as it was.

Hopefully next week I will start to see a more dramatic weight loss trend than I have the last two weeks. Perhaps I am spoiled by my first round results. Or perhaps I am just expectant, given the intensity of my workouts right now. Whatever the case, seeing small losses is a little discouraging having just come off a massive weight loss over nine weeks.

I woke up this morning struggling with the idea of working out. That is never a good sign.

I’ve been saying for the last couple of days that I need to get more sleep. I know for a fact that I have not been doing that and today it became painfully evident that if I ever expect to be able to start my day right I am going to need to get my sleep. Either that or I am going to have to move my workouts to the afternoons again. As much as I love starting my day out with a nice physical trashing like Insanity, I can say emphatically that I love the energy and strength I feel toward the end of the day when working out in the afternoons. So we’ll just have to see what happens next week.

Getting back to today… once I started working out I quickly found my motivation. So even though I’ve struggled in the last few days to get myself moving once I get myself moving I kick some serious butt. Today was no exception. I was able to rip through the warm ups as I have been doing since I started this round. And I was able to do very well through the first circuit again. I did it without stopping for rest completely with the exception of the Triceps Dips, which have been an ongoing struggle for me. Still, I did more of these today than ever before which is really my goal in any Insanity workout.

The second circuit was a little more interesting. I was able to do all of the workouts completely except for the Floor Sprints. Those did me in something awful, but I think it was because of the exhaustion I felt from the Moving Push Ups just before them. Needless to say, I stopped in each set of Floor Sprints today. And the challenge exercise you ask? Yes, that did me in as well, but not as I bad I thought it would. I only had to skip one set of Squat Pulses and half a set of Push Ups.

Overall today was quite an accomplishment for me. I did more than I have ever been able to do in any Insanity program yet. And I got closer to completing a program without stopping for rest than I have yet. Since I have two more weeks left of the beginning level routines, I think I am going to set a goal for myself to actually complete all three entry level programs – Plyometric Cardio Circuit, Cardio Power & Resistance and Pure Cardio – completely without stopping for rest by the end of week four. What do you think? Think I can do it?

I decided today to take it easy on myself and actually do what was scheduled for today: Cardio Recovery. I did this because my body is tired. Physically I’m hurting a little from the last two weeks of pounding myself daily. I needed the recovery and I’m glad I took it today. Last week I chose to do Max Interval Sports Training on my recovery day because I absolutely love that workout. I think if I wasn’t tired and feeling so worn out this morning, I would have done it again. I’m pretty sure next week I will be back on sports training instead of recovery on Thursday. We’ll see.

Cardio Recovery was sort of challenging today. It has been a while since I did slow squats and slow lunges, holding them in position for a while then pulsing them. I have to say I had to stand up a couple of times today during that part of the routine. I was burning like crazy during those and for a while I was actually shaking in my position as I held it. It was so crazy in fact that as I drove to work today I could still feel the effects of those moves almost two hours after I had completed them. Now that is a workout.

I also noticed today, again, that my shoulders need some work. Actually they need lots of work, not just some. But at least I know I can target them now, like I did my quadriceps in the first round. I’m hoping that before this round is over that I will actually be able to work my chest and core effectively from the plank position instead of being bound by weakness in my shoulders.

Otherwise my recovery workout today was awesome. I had forgotten how much I loved it when Shaun T looks into the camera while your legs are on fire and says “Remember, this isn’t cardio, it’s control.”. Thanks for reminding me Shaun T. I’ll try to remember that if I ever fully regain the use of my legs.

I may have to rethink my position on working out in the mornings. Today was an enormous struggle for me to find my motivation to get started. It has been like that the last few days. I wake up, I get out into the living room and have to fight with myself to get the DVD into the player and get the TV turned on. I may end up moving back to afternoons next week just to see if it improves my workouts any. Either that, or sleep more so that my mornings don’t seem to end so abruptly.

Much like yesterday, when I finally drew enough motivation to get started I was off to the races. I blasted through the warm ups yet again and I am now really hungry to find something that will push me further than the warm up is doing now. It seems like it is becoming so much easier to do that it is losing effectiveness now. I’m not sure how I want to go about fixing that other than to push myself a lot harder up front to cause more of a push toward the end of it. Whatever I choose to do, I need to come up with something fast. As it stands now I just don’t feel like I am getting the warm up that I used to get doing the warm up exercises.

The actual circuits were a little more interesting for me this morning though. Being tired from a lack of sleep makes pushing through later in the workout very hard. Today was evidence of that. As I worked through the first circuit I found myself feeling very tired at the end of each routine. And while I was able to complete the first circuit without resting again, when that first one was over I knew it was going to be a tough road to hoe moving forward. And it was.

The second circuit killed me early on. Basketball drills were easy enough. But Level 1 Drills really hit me hard today and I actually had to rest during them a couple of times. And since I had nothing left by Level 1 Drills, Ski Abs and In-n-Out Abs destroyed me. It was an awesome sight to behold, I’m sure… my big butt up in the air in a child’s pose almost as soon as my hands hit the ground. Which is also a sign to me that my shoulders need a lot of work. I thought for a long time that my quadriceps were causing my weakness in the plank position. But looking closer at it today I realized that my quadriceps are actually pretty strong now. My shoulders however, not so much.

So there I have it. I got completely wiped out, worked up a decent sweat and found out that my shoulders are a huge let down for me. I guess that isn’t so bad though. At least now I have something new to target for development.

I have been struggling with temptation greatly the last few days. It started last week, on Friday, when my wife, after a very long week and with some of our kids’ friends over, asked if she could not make dinner and instead order out. I agreed – she has been working very hard managing the home, a dinner off was the least I could do – so she decided she would order pizza for her and the kids.

One of the things that I am being most watchful over is my sodium intake. It is incredibly difficult these days to eat a low sodium diet unless you are diligent about every single thing you put in your body. It seems that everything has sodium in it. Bread, peanut butter, eggs… even chocolate has sodium in it. And it is very easy to hit the 2,400 mg per day RDA of sodium early in the day if you are not careful.

I am careful. I know the effects of sodium on me. Besides making me incredibly thirsty it also causes me to retain water for a long time. I feel fatter, more weighed down and generally very uncomfortable when I have too much sodium. And since pizza is like a salty bread plate covered in salty cheese, salty sauce and salty toppings, I have chosen to stay away from pizza, namely prepared or pizzeria pizza, for the last couple of months because I know the effects of excessive sodium on my system.

However, pizza happens to be my favorite food in the whole wide world. And staying away from it, though challenging, has been somewhat easy to handle simply because we have not had it in our home in the last couple of months. Until Friday. And leftovers on Saturday. And then today, when a department luncheon at work turned out to have free left over pizza from one of my favorite pizzerias. I felt like I was getting punched in the face by hunger. And not because I was hungry, but because the aroma of the pizza was so tantalizing that it totally enveloped me and drew me to it.

It is during times like these that I find myself testing my own strength outside the realm of exercise. For me, not giving in to temptation is extremely hard, especially when it comes to food. So digging deep and finding the strength to withstand that temptation is something that I enjoy the challenge of. It has been hard, but it has also been satisfying to know that I am not really a victim to my diet anymore. Where just a few months ago I would have loaded up on free pizza, today I simply said “thanks, but no thanks”. I felt strong. I felt accomplished. I felt healthy.

Those are very motivating for me, the feeling of accomplishment, strength and health. They make it a lot easier for me to handle temptation and distraction. And though I am not perfect, I am much more disciplined in my diet now than I was a few months ago. Because for me, my health is way more important than the temporary satisfaction I get from stuffing my face with food. In a few hours, when I’d get hungry again all that I would be left with is an overload of bad calories, way more salt than I should have had in my system to begin with and a feeling of disappointment in myself. To me, it simply isn’t worth it.

How about you? What do you struggle with when it comes to your diet? What are the bigger challenges that you face in your journey to get or remain healthy? How do you contend with that? I tend to think that we are all stronger than we give ourselves credit for. At least I know there isn’t a single dish out there that has ever pinned me down and forced me to eat it.

Today was an incredible struggle for me to get motivated. I think I am having a harder time than I thought I would getting acclimated to the morning routine I used to be one a couple of weeks ago. Waking up wasn’t that hard, but getting moving this morning was a fight from start to finish.

Once I got moving I was alright. I’m starting to find myself wanting more out of my warm ups now. Even when I feel exhausted I still seem to want a more rigorous warm up. And no matter how hard it seems I’m pushing through it, I still feel less than accomplished when I’m done. I may have to find a way around this before I get bored with the warm ups.

The actual Pure Cardio circuit was a different story. That captured my attention right out of the chutes, and I was able to push through all of the exercises today with the exception of Level 2 Drills and Push Up Jacks. Both of these caused me great exhaustion last time I did them. This time, though I had to rest during them, I didn’t have to rest as many times or for as long. So my workout this morning was essentially 15 minutes of beating my body into oblivion. And it felt great.

And one very nice thing about this morning’s workout was that I had an audience. My two youngest daughters decided they wanted to wake up early to watch me workout, so bright eyed and bushy tailed were they, on the couch watching me sweat this morning. I wasn’t sure how to handle that pressure. It is kinda hard to slack off when you have someone watching you.

Today I changed my routine back to working out in the mornings instead of the evenings. I was having a hard time finding the space and quiet I like to work out in. I was also feeling really fat and tired by the end of the day when it was time to work out, so I decided that I was going to go back to waking up early and working out first thing in the morning. That was hard on me this morning.

It took a little while to get myself awake to the point of being able to get my body up and moving. And even after I did I was still struggling with finding my motivation. Ultimately I kicked some pretty serious butt as I was able to complete most of the workouts with needing rest. Of course, that may be a little misleading since I didn’t feel as though I was pushing myself nearly as hard as I did the other day.

I’m hoping that tonight I can get a better grip of how tired I feel so I can get to bed at a reasonable time. I think getting good sleep, and drinking plenty of water the night before, makes for a much better workout in the morning. I know for a fact that last night I didn’t drink nearly enough water in the evening. I also know that I didn’t sleep as well or as long as I should have to ensure I had a good workout this morning.

Which may be a tip for some of you. Make sure you are always drinking plenty of water and getting your rest. You need energy to exercise, so your diet is very important. But equally as important is how much you rest your body. When it is time to sleep, sleep. I know there are plenty of things that you could be doing with your time. Just consider using some of that time to get your rest. And always, always, always drink your water. Even if you are drinking health drinks – and no, Gatorade is not a health drink – you still need lots of plain old water.

So stay hydrated, eat the right, energy producing foods and get your rest. And I will see you tomorrow when I take on Pure Cardio for the second time this round.