Upper body weight workout
45 minutes on the elliptical, low end of zone 1
Today's exercise:
10 mile run
I enjoyed a super-fun first yesterday: my husband's business partner asked if I'd help her with some upper body weights, so we met at the gym and I walked her through one of my workouts. I've got about 15 different weight routines that I cycle through so I don't get bored ... a nice variety of full-body, upper-only and lower-only workouts.
We chose Friday because that's the day I do upper body weights only. I weight train three times per week: full body on Mondays and Wednesdays; upper on Fridays since I usually take a long run on Saturday and don't want my legs to be too sore or tired for that.
I was kind of nervous about showing R my workout -- I really wanted to be sure that I knew the correct positioning of everything myself before I tried showing it to her. And clearly, I don't have any formal training so I wanted to be cautious; I'd feel terrible if I showed her how to do something incorrectly and she ended up hurting herself. But I realized, after looking through my selection of upper body workouts, that I've been doing them for so long and I'm so familiar with them now that I felt pretty confident about passing them along. It was also great to realize that, after five years of weight training, I've picked up a reasonable understanding of which muscle (or muscle groups) are working during a particular exercise. That might sound completely obvious, but for a long time I just did the exercises without really thinking about which muscles were supposed to be working. I know that I sometimes have let the wrong muscles take the lead, and I probably still do. But at least now I have a better sense of when I'm doing it. And happily, I felt good about being able to express to R how to do a particular exercise and where in her body she should be feeling it. It was great to see her working hard and feeling like she was getting something she wanted from the exercises I was showing her.
The best part was probably at the end of the workout, when I was showing R a bunch of ab exercises. I was giving her a bunch of my faves -- but then she told me she has an old injury that makes it hard for her to do ab work in a seated position. I was so happy to be able to offer her several really good options that worked around her injury ... stuff that has starting in a pushup position and working the abs from there. (Funny enough, those are the exercises that I can't do a lot because of my lingering rotator cuff problem; I have to be careful about not holding my weight on my hands too much.)
So, instead of my all-time favorite oblique exercise -- the medicine ball twist -- I suggested the side-lying heel lift* as well as the other ab move I wrote about a few days ago. And instead of the butt-kicking circles**, I gave her either the super-badass "walking hands on riser" (which she wrote down as "walk the plank," an apt description for how this feels while you're doing it) or the demoralizing and really hard -- but extremely gratifying if you can pull it off -- pike on the ball, where you balance your legs on a physio ball while holding your weight on your hands with straight arms, then raise your ass as high in the air as you can manage while rolling the ball inward. Man, that one is tricky. But she gamely tried them all and we parted ways with me feeling like I had given her some good, new stuff to do on her own. All in all, a really nice reinforcement of my desire to work toward becoming a personal trainer -- which would let me do this kind of work with confidence and authority!
Then this morning I did a nice 10 miles before it got too hot. It was actually misty outside when I left home -- one of the many fabulous benefits of living reasonably close to the water -- so for the first mile, I occasionally got to pass through wisps of ground-level clouds and feel the moisture. Heaven!
I planned a route that would take me past my sisters' house so I could pick up Sister A, who was my partner for Seattle's first Rock-n-Roll half marathon last month -- and overall, my favorite running partner ever. Our paces work really well together and we go slowly enough that we can chat the whole way, which makes the run go by super fast.
A isn't working on any particular distances right now but I'm trying to keep mine up so I'll be ready for the Victoria half in October. I figure if I keep myself able to do 10 throughout the summer, I can easily train up to 13 after my girls go back to school in September.
So I've been planning runs where I start on my own, meet up with A for a while, then finish solo. It's great to have her along for a good portion of the run -- as well as being fantastic company, she also moderates my pace. I find that I often start running at a pace that I can't sustain well when I'm by myself ... I really have to focus on slowing down, otherwise it can be really hard to finish. That makes it sound like I'm a super-fast runner and nothing could be further from the truth: when I'm running by myself and not talking, I average an 11-minute mile on long runs. When I'm with A and talking her ear off, we end up closer to 12-minute miles, probably because all that chatting slows me down.
Anyway, a lovely 10 miles and the end of my workouts for the week. Tomorrow's my rest day and I'm going to make the most of it -- starting with my older daughter's 13th birthday dinner tonight!
*Side-lying heel lift:
Lay on your your side, with the bottom arm straight out front and hand of top arm on your hip.
Lift both heels off the floor, paying particular attention to the bottom heel and keeping feet together.
Lower back down to the floor with touching.
Repeat for a set of 15-20, then switch sides and do it again.
**Circles:
Start flat on your back on the floor with knees up.
Straighten legs so feet are pointed toward the ceiling
Keeping legs straight, bring feet down to an inch or two above the floor (don't touch!)
Bring legs in so heels almost touch the butt
Go back to original position.
Do 15-20 complete rotations, then change the direction and do it again. Whew!
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