Workout: Triples & a brick

So on Thursday I rolled into Ultimate Fitness ready to rock, but a bit cautious. I’ve been breaking a lot of rules in terms of increasing run frequency in order to try and make my CIM less painful. However, the best way to injure oneself is to.. well, basically do exactly that: too much too soon.

On that note, I made sure to let SFF know that I wanted nothing to do with the “dreadmill”. Make me do 100 turkish get-ups instead, I don’t care. She was lenient, and had me do 100 rope skips, followed by 100 mountain climbers. Then again, except 90 climbers. And so on and so forth until I was at zero. I think my math is right when I calculate that out at 900 climbers and 1000 rope skips. For warm-up. Alrighty!

We moved then into “triples, basically three rounds of three movements. The first was 40 reps, the second 25, the final was 15 reps. We started with wide squats with an empty bar on my shoulders (30lbs), then hammer pullups and finally over head press with the same empty bar. To limit over-use on my quads, we then swapped out the squats for a nasty movement SFF called a “twisted plank”. Basically you start in a plank, bring one knee up to your chest, then twist it under you across your body. Bring it back across, then return to plant. 10 times each side, then back to pull ups and overhead presses.

Totaled up it was 120 squats, 150 pull ups, 90 overhead presses and 60 twisted planks.

After all that it was time to go home and rest. So, of course, I went home and ran 4 miles instead.

This is actually a good tip for learning to push your body past fatigue limits. For time efficiency, throw in a run immediately following a rough workout. Your body will be glycogen starved and you’ll hit a wall immediately. It can be a good time to test out calorie intake on the run and will also force you to focus on running efficiently.  Triathlete’s do this type of workout to help them deal with the stresses they face on race day as well. They will do a swim followed by a bike, or a bike followed by a run. They call it a “brick”.

Surprisingly, even though I was totally gassed and blown up, my pace for the 4 miler wasn’t significantly off what I normally run it in. Likely my effort was higher, and it wasn’t likely I could have done much more than 4, but it was a very useful experiment.

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