site banner

Wellness Wednesday for May 10, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Weekly Pentathlon attempt, five exercises for a target number of max reps in six minutes, five minutes rest in between, a fantastic use of the first hour after I wake up. Used the 28kg and tried to really push it on the early exercises and get closer to full marks, and just gutting through the last two sets was the plan.

Clean: 118/120

Long Cycle Clean and Strict Press: 60/60

Jerk: 81/120

Half Snatch: 64/108

Push Press: 120/120

443 total reps, at 3.5 points per 28kg rep, comes out to 1550.5 points. New PB, and I reached my goal of breaking 1500.

At this point I know it's 100% conditioning and breathing that is the issue. I want to reread Breathe and The Oxygen Advantage and spend the next couple weeks doing breathe work and working hard on cardio. If I could just keep my breath controlled as I hit the wall I could have gotten a lot more reps, but once I lose control of my breathe my technique gets all wonky, and I cut sets short rather than risk injury. That happened on everything after the Long Cycle. I was especially disappointed in myself that I lost reps on the Jerk, which should be the easiest exercise on the list by rights. If I had left Long Cycle reps on the table and rested longer, I would have gained points on the Jerk from being able to get more points overall.

A month into this game, the physique results have been good, on balance. My shoulders, biceps, tris, glutes, quads, adonis belt/cum gutters, and forearms are all looking better than typical for me. Abs are getting that kettlebeller look, like in photos of old-timey strongmen, I never get lower abs anyway. I highly recommend doing a month of trying to get a good score in this if you have enough KB experience to do all the exercises with good form. It is different enough from what I was doing before that I'm seeing great results.

I'm going to try to break 1700 yet, and then I'm seeing that I need some cardio work and conditioning. This has me in a "ridiculous challenge" mentality, so I'm eye-ing up doing an xfit "Half Murph" in my barn every morning, or close to that, for a few weeks.