Each month I'm having my gym trainer mix up my training, but this month it's stayed the same, except that I got him to check my form with it all and it's thrown up a lot of useful feedback.

I suppose the core of the current regime is Olympic weights every second day, never something I look forward to but through habit I'm just getting on with it & getting it over with. Through discussion of my workout/nutrition habits it's shown me I'm taking to much rest between sets so now I'm limiting all rest to no longer than 20 seconds. Phew-ee! I felt the difference in intensity instantly and have had to significantly cut what I was previously lifting. It's a bit galling to see weights come _off_ the bar rather than more on, but I'm working my way back up - this time with a bit more understanding of why my progress has been slow.

The best thing about cutting back on my rest is that I'm now spending less time in the gym doing something I don't like. Huzzah! I know a lot of people _love_ lifting and get really psyched about it, for me it's just something to endure to get results. I'll have to take some time pondering what they get out of it that enthuses them so much.

Games update

New games I've recently rented;

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel - Would have been groundbreaking 5 years ago. Just lots of quest grinding. Missable.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope - Looks like an enjoyable JRPG, Nice visuals, easily immersive, might come back to it at some point but you know how much of a linear timesink JRPGS are.

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai - Arcade style samurai slash-fest with girls wearing bikinis and sporting very.... elastic physics. Missable

X-Blades - Hackfest with a protagonist with v. little clothes. Missable

[PROTOTYPE] - Occasionally you come across a game and realise that what you're playing is not just a game, it's an experience. Only 45 minutes in and I realise it'll be tough sending this game away before I'm finished with it.

New trainer session, new moves

Russian Twists are out (thank goodness) CV sessions are in. After having a cold for a couple of weeks I've become a bit porkyer so will have some CV sessions mixed in with the normal ones for a while (yay!). I've been worried I've been losing some CV capacity as I've noticed myself sweating a bit more, but trainer indicated it might instead be I'm finally using my muscles correctly. I could sign up to that idea! ;)

Just played Xmen Origins Wolverine for the first time.

Damn is it fun!

I normally get a bit bored with 'walk along path - mash X button till everything that jumps out at you dies - rinse - repeat' gameplay, but this movie tie-in has enough charms to cover over the base story progressing mechanic, this is unlike Afro Samurai, which I played a couple of days ago for an hour and a half and will never again play. 

Afro's unique art-style is certainly nice to look at, and by the very nature of being cell-shaded doesn't have to agaonise over how far into the uncanny valley it goes, it just isn't engaging. I suspect i I'd watched the anime I'd have given it a longer try, as character familiarity is certainly a big bonus for my opinion of the Wolverine game. I shall enthuse later.

Working Lunch

Last 3 workouts have actually all gone well. The biggest difference to the situation is that I've been going in the middle of the day.  I've also shaken of the cold and been getting more sleep, each of which would have helped with recovery. I'm not entirely convinced the big difference in these 3 to earlier morning workouts is that I've got enough food in my system....or maybe I'm just reluctant to accept it. I've always been pretty woozy in mornings. I'm under the impression that over night, 'recovery time', I should be building back up my glycogen stores, and 'normal' testosterone levels are highest in the morning. Suppose I could just be trying to do to many things in the morning workouts, but daytime forrays into the gym just seem more successful during the day. 

Longterm it would mean having to go into work earlier, take a biiiig lunchbreak and then work later, but as long as the work gets done both at work and in the gym It'd probably be worth it.

Man, that was one bad workout I had this morning. Bad as in rubbish. My energy levels were so low and even doing the Olympic stuff with lighter than normal weights was too much. Not sure if it's that Ive not recovered properly from a recent cold, amn't getting enough rest or am going to the gym to early in the morning for my post-sleep meal to get into my system.
It's frustrating & disheartning.
Think if I should address one thing it's getting to sleep before 12. I'm hoping if I can get into the habit of getting enough early starts I'll default into the habit of early ends to the day.
6 hours sleep just doesn't seem to work for me working out.

I generally say I'm not competative, but at a party weekend past for some reason the topic of being able to get reach one's foot with one's mouth cane up, and as nearly everyone there demonstrted it was an easily accomplished feat. Except for me!
Tried my hand at some pilates the next day and I couldn't follow along as well as I'd like as I couldn't straighten my legs straight up in the air while my back was on the ground. Grrr.
This is a definite 'general fitness' flaw that I must rectify, but how to motivate myself?

Huzzah! My muscles are so tight that they've dragged my pelvis out of alignment! Yay!

Why Yay? Cos it explains a host of physical things that have been bugging me for ages.

Just back from my gym trainer and after my normally sore back (for threeish years)had been bugging me more than usual so I got him to take a look at what's up.

I've know for years that my muscles were overly tight, but I've never connected it properly with the lower back pain I get on one side, or why my weightlifting usually only gets so high before my form completely falls apart, or several other physical niggles.

He popped it back in place, though I couldn't hear it, and apparently It'll hurt like a hurty thing tomorrow. The forced 2-person stretch however _did_ hurt, muscle-twisting-off-bone hurty. I was shown a load of stretches that I _blatantly_ couldn't do but can think of as a challenge so will have to practice by myself frequently to get some proper mobility around the hips. (thankfully one of them can be done while playing video games!)

My lifting will have to drop down to about 60% until I can get aligned enough to get proper form, but that's fine, I'd rather do things right than 

I'm quite glad it's been identified. I was starting to plateaux again and it was robbing me of motivation. I could see things were going wrong but couldn't place where the problem was originating from so was starting to think I just wasn't pushing myself enough.

Start month update

Still plugging away at new workout schedule, though it changes every 3-4 weeks.

I’m definitely getting stronger, and gaining more knowledge about how my body (does/doesn’t) work.

As indicated in my last post the hardest part is fatigue. It’s not physical fatigue, or pain, it’s mental tiredness. My body/mind seems to be saying ‘No, _you_ don’t work this way. Stop lifting weights & instead run around the place like a good boy, you know you’ll enjoy it!’. Working out properly seems to be manifesting itself more as mental rather than physical stress, the same kind of mental tiredness that I’ve got while working/studying hella hard; I can feel the energy to do things but can’t get the mind to kick into the proper gear so go through the day in a half-doze.

I’ve been trying different things, sleep schedules, change of diet as well as exercise that’s against my physical grain, so I expect it’s just lots of wee shocks from different directions overloading my system and in an effort to reach an equilibrium it’s just trying to get me to stop.

Well sod my system, I’ll just have to fight through it and catch some perspective. There’s people that have to walk miles each day through war-torn countryside dodging bullets and rapists just to get some clean water so I’ve got nowt to complain about!

The hardest part of training

Is going to bed.

Trying to update via phone

Hope this works, having to use an app rather than doing this straight on the blogger site, doesn't seem to be gelling with my phone.
New workouts seem to take ages but seem to be working. Jogging, stretching, core work each sesh and on alternate days the rest of the sesh is either in the Olympic gym or doing ten to ones with a barbell. Still not getting enough rest (e.g - I'm in bed and am writing a blog post) but am cutting down on other activities in the hope I'll get to some sort of equilibrium involving more sleep. My self defense training is definetly going to suffer if I'm only doing one class a week but that's a compromise of my own choosing, gotta cut down on the running around the place.

Phew! Has it been that long since I updated this?
The rib healed fast enough for me not to remember how long it took to heal, If memory serves I was training a couple of weeks later and after 1.5 months there was no twinges at all.

I've been using my local gym for, cripes , must be at least 5 years now, and still a skinnymalink! I've never been a good judge of my own moods, character and it turns out body should be added to the list.
For the past 3 months I've been using a personal trainer who works in my gym and am feeling the benefits of regular bookings (knowing there's someone going to be properly checking up on what I'm doing seems to tap into a part of my personality that I can use to motivate myself...or perhaps I'm just at a place in life where I can stick to things better, but I'll never know!).
I started with explaining what I wanted, what's gone right in the past, what I've succeeded in doing and what flaws I've identified. Just by chatting then busting out some of the moves that I felt I had a problem with let the trainer see what's going wrong. Another pair of eyes critically examining what's going on is what I've needed for quite a while (and, again, maybe I'm just in the right place to query, explain and accept advice that may have passed me by in the past).

While I'm fit in regards to health I'm not strong, which has been a point of consternation for me for quite a while. In my self defence classes, when I compare myself to some of my other classmates I can see how they can do some things better. I can often run around, hit things, swing things, duck and dive around the place without breaking a sweat or geting short of breath while other people are left panting in a pile on the floor, but as soon as we do something like 30 pushups they've finished busting them out like pistons while I'm struggling to get to 10.

Through work and observations from my trainer I'm finally able to acknowledge and accept that I'm long-limbed and long-backed. In my head I suppose I've always just been 'people-shaped' and without realising how I'm actually shaped I've been trying to train like a 'normally' proportioned person. I've seen people shorter than me effortlessly curl weights that I'd be lucky to manage one rep with and I can now appreciate that as the 'levers' of my body are longer the simple mechanics of movement mean it's always going to be harder or me to do so (unless someone develops some ultra-dense movable armbands [you heard the idea here first!]).

The 'length' of my back is probably the main issue rather than my limbs. It's not that I can't use my core muscles properly, it's that my body has found different routes to get things done. The 'proper' core muscles aren't being used properly and the 'improper' core muscles are wound too tight. I can win on core flexibility (another trainer has compared me to a snake in that regard), but the flip-side is that I lose out on the core strength. I realise now that's where I've ben going wrong with things like press-ups. To do them properly you ned the body to act like a plank while the upper body does the pushing, but as my core is messed up the 'wrong' muscles I'm using to keep solid fatigue quickly as they're not meant to be used that way. The dry spaghetti that's needed for press-ups cooks too quickly and leaves my upper body trying to press a core that's al-dente at best, completely unresponsive overcooked pasta at worst.

So for the past 2ish moths I've been on a gym programme that's serving a few different purposes, the core (nyuk-nyuk) purpose being to start re-wiring the way I use my muscles, strengthening the core muscles that I've unintentionally been neglecting and improving my lactic resistance in unaccustomed muscles

As of yesterday (oh, wait, it's past 12, so that'd be 2 days ago) the workout has changed an will now be different each day and will be hella-harder. Both the effort involved and for the where I'll be doing the work. My most recent workout could be one in a few different places in the gym, so I've been able to work around the other users, but now some of it will have to be in the 'Olympic' area so I'll now have to compete for the benches and barbells. While not a workaholic I don't like to waste time, and generally do more than one thing at a time. Having to wait for people to vacate equipment just winds me up and rather than just standing queuing to use things I'm inclined to just hop on a CV machine or take off entirely.

So new work starts soon, lets hope the shock of it comes more as a novelty than something to retreat from. Technically I should start it today, but as it's 2Am I won't be exactly sparkling tomorrow and I did something to my knee in self-defense class tonight that's making me walk with a limp (either kneeing someone in the head or being pranged with a wooden knife!) so I'm guessing barbell squat jumps might not be the best thing at the mo.