John’s Ramblings

I’ve been struggling to get in my home workouts for the past couple of weeks.  Emphasis on cycling, lots of work to do around the house, school, and to be perfectly frank, a bit of a lack of motivation has kept me from doing anything but the bare minimum to assuage my guilt.  Well, it wasn’t working as either a quality workout routine nor a guilt-assuager.

Part of my problem has been that I never quite got my head around the Wednesday night training vs. Saturday morning sessions that I had been doing at Hocevar Performance Gym.  Wednesday nights actually work better for me in a lot of ways, I just never quite got into the rhythm of what I was going to be doing workout-wise for the rest of the week.

Given that my spare time is a pretty precious commodity right now (and for the foreseeable future) I am going to concentrate my hard training time on the kettlebell/bodyweight training, and taper back on the road cycling.  Practically speaking I can accomplish a helluvalot of conditioning in 4 hours a week with the kb’s, but I’d need 2 to 3 times that amount of bike time to just maintain.  I asked Luka to provide me with some workouts that I can schedule during the week, and he obliged with a series of 4 workouts that utilize my inventory of kettlebells, exercise equipment, and (gulp) the hill that my house sits at the bottom of.

Much of the training I’m doing with Luka is Escalating Density Training, or EDT.  The principal of EDT is to do a set of alternating exercises that use opposing (or different) muscle groups, and do as many sets as you can in a given period of time (known as PR, or Personal Record).  Monday was Luka’s “Workout A”:

4 sets of:

• Kettlebell front squats, (2 x 20kg), 8 reps
• Negative Chin Ups (3 second descent from chin-over-bar), 5 reps

EDT-PR Zone 1: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 9)

• 10 x 24kg kettlebell swings
• 10 pushups

EDT-PR Zone 2: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 5)

• Kettlebell reverse lunges, 6 reps R & L, 16 kg kettlebell
• Kettlebell 1 arm rows, 24 kg, 8 reps R & L

3 sets of:

• 10 x v-ups
• 30 second plank

The principal here is that I will be able to do more work with less rest as I progress… so future sessions of “Workout A” should mean more rounds completed (by virtue of having to rest less), and eventually more weight being used.  I’ll try to keep up with my posting here, so you can keep score at home.

Oh, and then I went for a bike ride.  Recovery pace, about 13 miles, lovely weather for it.

Tags: exercise, hocevar performance, kettlebell

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