One week to the Olympics!!

I can't wait!
Meanwhile, my respite from allergies has ended, but I just have sniffles and itchy eyes so far, and no respiratory irregularities.  I'm wiped, though, and decided to do a familiar workout: zwow 5.  One of my favourites!  And I wimped: I was using 10 lb dumbbells for the first exercise, but today I stuck to 5 lbs.   And I was using 15 lb dumbbells for the sumo pull, but today I stuck to 5 lbs.  It felt like I did enough, though!

Which leads me to recent musings of workout regimen continuation.  I'm very inconsistent long-term.  Much of it has to do with moving somewhat often, and most of the time I can't keep things together when even a short trip is thrown in.  But there's more to my shortcomings than that:

The workouts don't get easier.  Never!  They stay hard.  At least, they should.  However, I've recently realized that I cling to the classic learning curve, the struggle and then the coast thereafter. Workouts should become more biomechanically familiar over time, but once they get easy, they are not as effective.  The solutions to keeping them hard are a faster tempo, heavier weights, and sometimes adjusting the exercises (example, propping feet up in pushups).

I haven't been consistent nor mindful enough to manage this.  Yeah, I have put more weight on my dumbbells from time to time (and taken it off more recently), but mainly, in the past, I've added more exercises and more reps, making my workouts longer and more boring and eventually abandoned prematurely.  I couldn't see past a certain plateau.  My thought was, hey, it's starting to feel easy, yay, thank goodness, so just do more of it.

No, it will never feel fine!   These days, I'm taking that concept to heart.  No matter how many times I do zwow 5, or whatever, it's got to feel hard.  I will find success not in an easier workout but in more weight, more speed, etc, so that in real life, lifting that box/bike/toolbox will become easier.  But never the workout.

I've stuck to 3 zwows/week for the past six weeks and I feel that my body is adjusting nicely to the load. Things in real life have become easier.  Part of my job is washing OR ceilings and walls once every two weeks--since the army moves my husband and I often to random places, I'm always the new person and I get to do those tasks, although this job is altogether the best one I've had since leaving Asia 7 years ago, by far.  Heck, virtually no poo (actually, I don't mind poo), no verbal abuse from emotionally damaged/demented/special needs people (except from one nurse, but we're cool now), and I'm expanding my musical knowledge (got acquainted with Curtis Mayfield this week).  Anyway, when I first started, it hurt to clean one OR per shift with someone else helping me, but now I can do all three in one shift on my own and feel fine.  Another gauge are the stacking step stools they have: lifting two at once was kind of hard at first, but now I can lift--barely--four of them.  I think they weigh slightly more than ten pounds each, and they are a bit awkward to grasp too.

So, do I add another zwow, or do I try to make the 3/week harder?  Or both?  Still deciding.  Option 1 would be my old way, option 2 would force me to dig deeper, and option 3 might be too daunting at this point.  I won't be doing 2 or 3 until after the heatwave ends, at any rate!