Fitness

I took last week off from my fitness program, mainly to give my shoulder a chance to recover from the muscle spasm of the previous weekend. While traveling in Cleveland, I resumed the Hundred Push Ups program, starting on column one of week four. Days 1 and 2 are out of the way, and I did some cardio at the hotel gym on Day 2 as well. My shoulder and back are feeling much better, but I'm betting today's 5-hour flight home did not help my back and neck any. I was squashed against the window by a very big guy sitting in the middle seat. Not fat, just tall with wide shoulders.

I completed Week 4 on Saturday, but only just barely. I then proceeded to have a bad muscle spasm somewhere between my neck and shoulders for the next 2 days, recovering enough today to do a fitness test. I failed. I needed to be able to do at least 31 push ups, but gave up at 28. I might have been able to force it to 31, but I'm just not feeling very fit. I've had bad headaches most of the weekend, on top of (or perhaps related to) the muscle spasm in my shoulder, and I've just not been hitting the exercise bike enough.

Day 3, Week 3 of Hundredpushups.com happened on Saturday. It was a struggle, but I did the recommended number of push ups: 20, 15, 15, 12 and then 16 or more, of which I wimped out and did the bare minimum of 16. That's 78 push ups in 20 minutes, more than I've ever done before, and quite possibly more than all the push ups I've ever done in my life.

Wow, this session was tough. I was supposed to do 16, 14, 14, 12 and then a minimum of 15 more push ups. Being my usual dyslexic self, I got the numbers mixed up and did 16, 12 and 12 before I realized I left off some push ups. The last two sets I did 16 and 15, but it was quite a strain to squeeze out the last 3-4 reps.

It's the day after, and I'm less sore than I thought I would be. I did about 25 minutes on the exercycle after swimming for an hour with my daughter and wife. Well, my daughter did most of the swimming, I was used mostly as life raft/diving board/audience for her.

On Sunday, I did 20 push ups in a row, testing my endurance and strength and setting the level for Week 3 of Hundredpushups.com. I might have been able to do more than 20, but I wasn't going to push it. Then I looked up where that placed me, and was initially disappointed to note that I was back to rank "1" for Week 3, but then I looked at the number of reps per set for the rank "2" program, and decided that being on level below wasn't all that bad.