Jumping rope is hard, not listening makes exercises harder

Tuesday means one thing: The SacFitnessFairy has a new and creative method by which to torture me. As it turned out, I managed to make it worse by not following directions. But we’ll get to that.

As always we started on the treadmill with a quick 1 mile run. I managed to kill one of the treadmills. I’m rough on equipment apparently.

Then we came to our workout. It would be a 3 tiered reverse pyramid of 2 exercises with jump rope in between. First round was 30 reps, 30 reps, 3 minutes, then 20, 20, 2 then 10, 10, 1.

Exercise one was a “thruster”. Essentially you stand, holding a curl bar with weights with your arms straight. Reverse curl up to your shoulders. Squat, then explode up while doing a press. Lower to shoulders, uncurl, that’s one rep. Yeah, 30 of those. Good gloves are key, that bar starts to get hard to hold after about 20 of the things.

Exercise 2 used the TRX straps. After tying the straps together you grab one with one hand and lean back, bending your knees till you are in a table position. Pull up with that one arm while twisting towards the buckle on the strap. Lower back down. That’s a rep. 15 on each side.

I can’t stress how hard this was for me. I could barely do 2 or 3 at a time. SFF was confused as this was well within my ability to do, and here is where having a trainer helps. For once I was wearing fairly baggy clothing and she could not see that I wasn’t keeping my core as solid and in place as I should have been. This actually made the exercise extremely more difficult, as I was having to hold up both my weight and the push-off I was getting from my legs. I asked her to watch my form more closely and she spotted it right away and we got it fixed. Boom, suddenly 10 at a time was totally doable and I got them chunked out.  Sometimes cheating makes the movement tougher.

The jump rope is my nemesis. We’ve been over that. It is possible I simply have no rhythm. Today I got to use “the good rope” and boy what a difference. It was shorter and lighter, but incredibly smooth. The length meant I had to concentrate but it also mean my swings were more consistent (you can’t explain that!) I actually managed to do most of my 2 minute rope without nailing myself in tender places. And then… well, yeah. Ouch. On the bright side the rope was green and matched my shoes.

The reverse pyramid structure can be very inspiring. That first set of 30 sucked (though of course perhaps it might have sucked less had I followed her directions of keeping my core solid). The 20 was very tough, but I roughed my way through it. Making the last set “only” 10 reps made it seem easy, even though in reality the exercises really weren’t.

SFF mentioned that normally there’s a rope climb (instead of the TRX) and the progression is 50 | 40 | 30. So I have that to look forward to. 🙂

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