Workout Recap - Week of June 23, 2019
Rebellious Air Conditioner 2: Infernal Bugaloo was what I had to deal with for most of this week, but that's hardly interesting enough by itself, right? No, how about also throwing in a stone chip to my car's windshield right on a Friday before a holiday weekend, too? In equal parts amusement and annoyance, the auto glass repair places near where I live tried to give me shit for calling them just before their closing times, when they had nobody available to do the repair. It's as if they thought I had the temerity to plan for it to happen when it did.
Fortunately, the chip didn't grow into a full crack overnight and I was able to get a referral from a mechanic to a place that was able to fix it easily, so that's a happy ending for that story. On the workout front, though, it did get in the way of doing anything on Friday, so I had to settle for just four workouts this week. Little enough to be gained by getting worked up about it, of course.
Sunday
Type: Pass/Fail
Kneeling Fingertip Push Ups - 2 sets of 15 (pass)
One-armed Dead Hangs - 2 sets of 10 breaths, each side (fail, 10/7+3)
Cossack Squats - 2 sets of 5, each side (pass)
Bonus: 2 sets of 5 rolling squat kips
The Cossack squats ended up being less of an issue than I'd built them up to be in my head. The balance aspect of them was certainly tricky, and I'd like to improve at them enough to be able to control whether I stay in place or move, but the strength and power demands weren't as bad as I'd been expecting. I'll stick with them as-is for a few more workouts, but I'm wondering if I might want to dial them up to doing pistol jump squats sooner than later.
Tuesday
Type: As Fast As Possible
21/15/9 Pull Ups
21/15/9 Bridges
21/15/9 Straight Leg Raises
Time = 8:45
Bonus: 5 rolling squat kips, 5 bridge kips
The workout wasn't too ambitious because it was simply too hot to push myself safely for anything other than racing a clock. After finishing it and doing a set of rolling squat kips, though, I felt like I still had a lot of violence left in my waist. I provided myself right on that, albeit with an incident involving breaking an HDMI cord with an accidental kick along the way. On that note, I'm pretty excited that I am able to kip into a bridge, but I feel like I'm getting about 90% of the explosion for it from my waist. I might need to do some remedial work to focus on integrating a purposeful leg kick and arm thrust with the hip snap to eventually progress to kipping up fully to a standing finish, but in the mean time, going from laying on my shoulders to being in a bridge in an instant is pretty badass.
Thursday
Type: Pass/Fail
One-armed Handstands - 1 set of 20 breaths, each side (pass)
Three-Limb Bridge Cycle - 1 set of 10 breaths, each arrangement (pass)
Hanging L-sit - 1 set of 20 breaths (pass)
One-armed Dead Hang - 1 set of 10 breaths, each side (fail, 7+3)
Bonus: 6 Superman push ups, 2 bridge kips
On paper, the dead hang result was similar to Sunday's workout. In practice, though, I'm inclined to consider this to be a superior performance, given that it was preceded by more work on the bar.
Saturday
Type: As Fast As Possible
7 sets of:
7 Pull Ups
7 Bridges
Time = 6:15
Bonus: 1 pull up, 1 bridge, 1 bridge kip
I was blown away by how well I did with this workout, because it felt like a sluggish struggle while actually doing it. I have made some nice strides with my pull up endurance in the past couple of months, though, and I suppose my new-found fondness for bridge kips has helped to improve my bridging in general, so maybe it just felt sluggish because I was in good control of the movements from start to finish. Whatever the reasons, the final time speaks for itself.
