Last week, my workout recap was about the goals and improvements I was hoping to be able to accomplish soon in my workouts. I know that it’s okay not to always have huge improvements, but I also want to make sure that I’m doing things to challenge myself because I do want to get stronger. I do remind myself that no matter what, a workout is better than doing nothing. But I also want to make sure I’m not stagnant for too long.
Sometimes, there are opportunities to challenge myself more in the workouts, and sometimes I don’t get that chance. And this past week, the workouts actually worked out well for me and what I wanted to improve on.
For cardio, a lot of the workouts had long push paces. Doing a long push pace is the perfect way to test my endurance and see if I can maybe consider something harder for my push pace going forward. It wasn’t always easy doing a 3-minute push pace at my current resistance level, but as I did more of those throughout the week, it felt a bit more normal. I didn’t change the resistance level for any of my workouts, but I would like to start testing things by doing the shorter push paces one level higher. And I feel really confident in trying that because not only did we have long push paces throughout the week, we had a lot of workouts that had 1-minute all-outs. I’m much more used to doing 30-second all-outs, so 1-minute ones feel really long. But I was able to get through them so I feel like doing a 1-minute push pace at a level between my current push pace and all-out is doable. My only big concern is feeling okay doing a base pace after a push pace at that level since after an all-out we usually have a walking recovery.
I also had some good opportunities to work on improving my rowing. When we had short rowing intervals, mainly ones that lasted under a minute, I was shocked when I saw what the wattage was as I was rowing. I am very used to seeing my wattage on the rower pretty low, which can be frustrating since that represents how much power is behind each stroke. I don’t know what changed or why I was able to do more, but my wattage was double at times from what I’m used to. I wasn’t able to maintain this for all the rowing intervals for the entire week, but it happened often enough that I really noticed. I did continue to struggle with my endurance on the rower, but I noticed that this past week it was also a struggle because of the pain I’m feeling in my foot. I think that sometimes, I can get on the rower and it doesn’t trigger the pain in my foot, and other times I just seem to do things exactly right or wrong and it makes my foot hurt so much. Hopefully, when I see the specialist I’ll have more answers about what is happening with my foot so I can make sure that pain doesn’t continue to affect my workouts that way. But I feel like overall, my rowing was an improvement compared to what I’m used to so I’m not that let down by the struggles I had.
Unfortunately, on the floor there weren’t really opportunities for me to do a lot of work with increasing the weights I use. I continued to try to use heavier weights to test out how they felt and then went back to my normal weights if I couldn’t manage the heavier ones. But I never really was able to go heavier for various reasons. The biggest struggle is seeing how using weights that are just a bit too heavy affects my form. Sloppy form with weights can lead to injuries, which is something I know I don’t need to add to my current health issues. I also had some issues with my foot and some of the exercises on the floor. I couldn’t do things on my toes such as push-ups because bending my foot that way hurts. That’s not too odd for me, but what was weird was that I couldn’t even rest my foot on the ground when I did those exercises on my knees. I normally do that because it adds some stability to the exercises. But this past week, I was keeping my feet up which made me very unstable for several exercises and I had to go a lot slower.
I am so happy that the workouts matched up pretty well with allowing me to work on the things I really wanted to try to do. Obviously, it won’t always be that way and I will have to challenge myself on my own when I can. I don’t know if I’ll have a lot of opportunities to do that this week since I’m expecting my pain and nausea to kick in at some point this week. But I’m hopeful that maybe that won’t kick in until toward the end of the week so I will be able to have at least some good workouts this week. But even if they are all struggle workouts, I’ll get them done just like I always do.
You Might Also Like
Just A Normal And Good Workout Week (or Using My Workouts To Get Out My Stress)
A Short And Slightly Painful Workout Week (or Still Getting In My 3 Workouts)
Working Hard (or Some Normal But Tough Workouts)
Back To My Normal Routine (or Working Through My Workouts)
An Unplanned Shorter Workout Week (or Making The Most Of Each Workout)
Another 3 Workout Week (or Grateful For A Lack Of Rowing)
