January always seems to drag on and yet I’m still late writing this post. I guess it’s been a little busy but perhaps I was also just being lazy. It’s not been easy getting motivated to do anything. My actions were as frozen as the city around me, but that’s starting to change. So let’s get into my 2025 goals.
Tag: fitness Page 1 of 7
I recently talked about running my first half-marathon at the Flying Pig. I had fun doing it and I’ll think about if I want to do it again however it marks the end of an era. The half-marathon was my FitBit’s swan song. I am officially retiring my FitBit and it feels really weird; I have “phantom device” syndrome.
A few years ago I bought an Apple Watch but I kept using my FitBit because it had so much of my walking/running data that I didn’t want to give it up. Essentially I had two fitness devices and it was time for one to go.
Ahh, the notorious goals (or more colloquially known as resolutions). I will cover the usual three main areas of focus: Technical Skills, Reading Challenge, and Wellness. I’m hoping for a little more diligence on my part to really focus on all of these goals. I did pretty well last year but there were a couple of bumps along the way. So let’s set those 2024 goals, shall we?
It’s that time again, time to make my 2022 New Years intentions. I made some progress in all of the areas in which I declared intentions in 2021. I will get into more details in each of their respective sections below. 2021 was not as challenging of a year as 2020 but it had its moments. This damn Covid virus continues to wreak havoc physically, mentally and emotionally. It has the country, and possibly the world, divided. Some are scared, some refuse to be afraid, and some just don’t know what to believe anymore. The media is at fault.
About a month ago I wrote a mid-year review of my 2021 intentions. In that time I have made some changes to my workouts and running goals. As I said in that post, I have a strategy for improving my daily run distance to 6 miles a day. I am officially running that distance. Granted it’s not quite 6.2 (i.e. a 10k), however adding two-tenths of a mile is a very minor adjustment.
I have not run 9 miles on my push day, yet. I am still calculating how I can achieve that distance given the geography of my location. My hope is to try to hit that goal by mid-to-late August.
Beast Mode Engaged
So this brings me to the pre-workout. There are two areas I focus on as part of my pre-workout; core and strength training. Three days a week my pre-workout focuses on strengthening my core. I tried a few exercises while attempting to keep the reps and sets within 15-30 minutes.
Core Strengthening Exercises
This is the pre-workout Core exercise routine that is working well for me:
- 30 sec planks x 3
- 10 squats x 3
- 10 doorway rows x 3
- 1 minute farmer’s carry x 2
- 10 kettle bell swings (with a dumb bell) x 2
Strength Training Exercises
Then, two days a week, I focus on strength training. This is where I get a little intense. I initially started with doing push-ups, which I hate doing. Then I saw my sister and her husband doing burpees and I thought, well if they can do burpees then so can I. So I changed my push-ups to burpees.
Burpees suck as much as everyone says they do. They. Are. Hard. I changed my push-ups to burpees and I was doing that for about a week. Then someone told me about a similar exercise called the devils press, which is aptly named. It’s basically a burpee with dumbbells. Watch this short video to see how to do this exercise.
I changed my burpee to this exercise starting at 15 lb. dumbbells because my upper body is still a little weak. So this is my strength training routine:
- 6 Devils Press (burpee) x 3
- 10 Dumbbell Dead Lift x 3
- 10 Dumbbell Row x 3
- 8 Dumbbell Standing Curls x 2
- 8 Seated Dumbbell Tricep Extensions x 2
By the end of the week, assuming I complete all of these routines and my 6 miles each day, I feel pretty good. My body feels like I’ve had a decent workout and I’m not too sore or too tired. My goal is to stick to this routine for a couple months and see how I’m feeling by the fall.
/cheers
I could accomplish so much more if I only had minions!