One Kettlebell to Rule Them All

Today I was able to do 5 minutes of 6×6 snatches with the 24kg kettlebell as part of the 10 minutes of snatching on the 15:15 second protocol from VWC. (If that makes sense to you… get help!) I did the other five minutes with the 16kg.

I went out for my run and decided about 5 minutes into it to change it up. I curved around to the far side of the grassy field at the school and replaced the rest of my run with 5 bouts of Tabata protocol sprinting. That’s 20 seconds all out, 10 seconds jog, repeat.

I am serious, you can’t do that more than a few times without wanting to puke.

Got back to the house and did 4 minutes with the mace. Good workout.

Yesterday I did the same workout from last Friday, the 30-second ladders. This time I was a little smarter about it and use dthe 16kg for the cleans and presses and for the snatches instead of trying to power through with the 24kg.

It was still pretty challenging, and those last two sets I really felt like I was working pretty hard. I decided to go two rounds instead of just 1. Great workout.

Today I did a run again. I realized from yesterday’s workout and from my recent Saturday runs that I am improving my work capacity (either keeping more weight moving or running faster) but only for short bursts. I was doing the 1/2 mile sprints which were good, but decided I needed to increase those. So I did two 1-mile stretches of additional effort.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fast dude, but I did a mile in 7:20 and the second in 7:30. I had a half-mile at about 9:30 in the middle and at the end. Anything less than 8:00 minute miles is fast for me.

Today the schedule called for our standard SFP 2.0 workout, which is a winner all around.

Since hitting 10 sets of 5 reps with the 24kg kettlebell, my next goal is to increase to six reps per set. Today I got four sets of six. My left grip started going and my form began to suffer so I went back to five reps per set.

The run was fine. I didn’t push as hard as last week, when I broke my under 1 minute record, but still hit the top of the hill at 1:04.

The only change we’ve made is to do 5 minutes of mace swinging at the end of the run instead of the 5 minutes of KB swings. I think I need to work on my technique, as I hit myself in the back a couple times. I can tell this is a great pulling exercise, though. We’ll see what my shoulders and back have to say about it tomorrow morning.

I call this workout “The Punisher” for two reasons. First, my eating was not up to par this week and even at my morning weigh-in, I was still over where I was last Saturday. That was disappointing. In my worst week previously, I didn’t go below Saturday’s weight until Thursday. So I had to do something I knew would burn some calories so I could try to beat last week’s weight at my post-workout weighing.

And again, I know it’s not right or important or good or motivational to weigh every day. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I do.

I didn’t to CBND because there was some kind of activity going on at the school.  I went back to my trail and did a four mile run, with four 1/2 mile intervals of higher effort. It was a good workout. The trail has 1/2 mile markers, so it is easy to know the waypoints.

After I had done half miles of easy, hard, easy, hard I saw that my second “hard” half-mile was slower than my first. The first was about a 7:30/mile pace, and the second was about 7:45. That was my turnaround point, halfway through the run.

The second reason I call this one “The Punisher” is that to motivate myself to push a little harder, I set a goal for the next hard half-mile. If I could beat a pace of 7:45, I could keep it at a half-mile interval. If I was slower, I would have to keep up the pace for a full mile. That worked, and I hit 7:30 again. I wondered how that would work on my last split, because that was my last half-mile and I would be back at my car. I pushed it anyways and came in just a few seconds better than the 7:30 of the previous interval.

Best news was that I was able to weigh in 4 oz short of last Saturday, so I did lose a teeny tiny bit of weight this week after all.

Today was the first day of selecting one each of a push, a pull, a core and a leg exercise, and two “full-body” exercises. I chose board pushups, plank rows, hot potatoes, step-ups, alternating swings and jumping rope. Today was to include four times through those six exercises, with no rest between exercises and just a minute or two between sets.

Overall, Mission Accomplished. I started with 7 pushups on my new pushup board, then did 20 plank rows (ala Steve Maxwell) alternating the 16kg and the 24kg bells, 20 “hot potato” tosses with the 16kg (also Steve Maxwell), 20 weighted step-ups with the 24kg, 20 alternating swings and finished with 1 minute of jumping rope. Man, that first set was tough.

So I did it three more times, each time adding one more pushup at the beginning, and keeping everything else the same. It took me about six minutes per set, and I finished in 30 minutes total. Completely wiped out, but in a good way.

This was a very hard workout for me, but not so hard that I couldn’t make it through. I consider that just about right.