Hi Team,
Thanks to everyone for an amazing week in the gym. Hard to believe how busy the place has been – but we have had more than 220 people (on average) complete a group session every day from Monday until today. Which is amazing. Our overall record has been 225/day (achieved earlier this year – February of course!) and we are actually challenging it this month. The morning classes in particular have been crazy – whoever would have thought when we dipped a toe in the ‘5am water’ with a 3-day per week trial! – that a few years later we would have 40x people doing a class at 5am every day of the week? Not me, that’s for sure…so thanks to everyone who got to the gym.
We have another fun week of classes ahead of us this week – a few people out there will be glad to see the end of the mini-sleds (for a little while anyway) and whilst I do like them, I have to admit that pushing them from the pull-up bar to the speedball and back is one of the tougher things to do in the gym. This week we have a little bit more running/SPARC’ing to do, there is a “No-Minute” rounds session on Tuesday (you move on when you are done…some people might do 2-laps, others only 1!) and we also have the return of the hamstring burning ‘sprint start’ exercise. Basically, classes look great – let’s get started.
What else? Well, there is (of course) a great big hole in the wall now and we are getting ever closer to opening the facility next door. I talked a lot about it last week so don’t want to go over all of that again – essentially the costs involved in accessing the ‘new’ gym will be an increase of approx. $1/day over what you are paying at the moment. So if you are budgeting, that’s what it is. I HOPE (really, really HOPE) that the Body Scanner will be back in the gym in the next couple of days. And I have my latest ‘screen time’ report from my iPhone and I am down 25% over the last two weeks…so that’s been a positive life change. Interestingly, the usage that once was a ‘flat line’ now has a real ‘peak’ on Friday night and Saturday afternoon – which is good because if I am ever going to be sitting on my phone, those are the times to do it!
On with it. And this is a blog that I feel I write half-way through every ‘challenge’…so here we are. And it is all about ‘a little bit extra’!
For the past 3x weeks, I have done my classes (my week by week numbers are 5-4-5) and also had to complete the 3x ‘extra’ or ‘challenge’ work-outs. Each of those takes between 10-15minutes. Even if you say for a second that they only take 10-minutes, that is an extra 30-minutes per week, every week, for 5-weeks (the length of the challenge). Which is an extra 2.5 hours of pretty high intensity effort (particularly the ‘Tres Hundo’ which makes you go flat out in order to finish) every month. Which would be an extra 30 hours per year – all in little, bite sized pieces that can be chewed up before and after your normal training sessions.
Now – I know we all have chaotic lives and are literally racing from one appointment to the next, but can you imagine the benefits of adding that much high-intensity work to your life every single week/month/year?
Now I know that the classes are ‘enough’ – they are surely enough for me – but there is no doubt that doing a little bit extra brings BIG benefits. The question is of course, how can you drive yourself to do the extras outside of the challenges? Why (for example) would you spend 10-minutes doing sprints on the bike ergs (interspersed by kettlebell front squats and pushups) when you don’t ‘HAVE’ too?
Well – you don’t have to go to the gym at all to be truthful. So since you are already going which means you are already MOTIVATED, why not try and maximise the benefits that you are getting out of what is an awesome daily habit. After all, just like no-one (not a single person) lays awake in bed dreaming of brussel sprouts, no-one wakes up in the morning with someone pinning them down, preventing them from getting out of bed 10 minutes (and that is all we are talking about) earlier than usual. Like I said, I talk about this stuff during every challenge – mostly I guess because I am experiencing the benefits of doing 2-3 simple ‘extra’ workouts every week – and I just want everyone else to feel those same changes. One thing that isn’t BS is that the harder you push it in your training, the easier you will find it to:
Get back to the gym for your next session
Stay on track with your eating.
The other thing about the challenges I am liking – I am writing down my times. I’ll be honest – and this will come as a bit of a surprise to people who knew me ‘back in the day’…I am not that much of a competitive person any more. Even with these challenges, I don’t need to be the ‘fastest’ in the gym. Truthfully, I don’t even really feel the need to better my time in the challenges from the week before. What I do need to do is stay within a “Bull’s Roar” of my previous time. If last week was 11:30, this week can be 12:10…but it cannot be 13:00. I don’t need to be faster – what I do need to do is be able to just be putting forth a consistent (well, relatively consistent!) effort whilst also understand that some days I will feel better than others, some days I will have done other training that impacts my score…in other words, if you are going to do the extras – in order to get the benefits you have to have a pretty reasonable crack at it (even if you don’t need to treat it as the gold-medal event at the Olympics).
I love the challenges – spending a 4-5 week period really nailing down my food and training really does keep me on track not for the month…but honestly, I want those challenge benefits 12- months of the year (with a bit more flexibility to enjoy a beer and a burger on the weekends). Finding a way to keep a couple of high intensity, short duration, non-boxing class ‘extras’ in each week will (I think) really help me stay on track.
See you in the gym,
Michael.
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