Insanity Workout Day 24: Pure Cardio Makes My Head Hurt, But At Least Ski Downs Following Mountain Climbers Makes Sense

1-28-10: I may have to make another small modification to the schedule. The day off is supposed to prepare me for the next week of hell. Only, I have been playing basketball the night before the start of the next day’s workout. Meaning that I typically have 24 hours in between workouts, except for after my “day off” in which I only get 10. I think my day off needs to be on Thursday, which would maintain a 12 hour spacing in between my last workout of the Insanity week and my basketball game, but would allow a day of rest to come after that hellish day. I think I could really use that day off to recover. This would also move Recovery day to Monday, which is also better as it is a shorter workout, meaning I should be able to start the work week off right.

I made it through the second iteration of the warm-up today. And the second time was at an increased speed. Excellent. I also made it through most of the initial sprinting of the third iteration of the warm-up before breaking. Still not where I need to be, but definitely some good personal improvement.

Rethinking most of the stretches, really there is only one that I hate. Sure, my form is suspect for the deep lunge, the one that kills me is the stretch that Shaun T tries to trick us with. He wants us to think it is a stretch, but it really isn’t. He thinks he can just throw a cardio exercise in the middle of the stretching and I’m not going to notice? Oh! I noticed Shaun T! The exercise comes right after the hip flexor stretch (my actual stretching nemesis). The idea is to balance on one leg, with your other leg parallel to the ground and your arms providing additional balance on the floor. The “stretch”, or so he calls it, requires moving the back leg in and out. This isn’t stretching. This is another “he hate me” drill.

The actual workout for Pure Cardio is terrifying. Still, I at least can make an imaginary story for part of it. This being where the mountain climber exercise starts. This is essentially high knees while alternating grasps at the ceiling with your arms. To the casual observer, it appears that you are climbing…well…nothing…you actually would look quite insane. Since this is the Insanity workout, you are clearly in the right state of mind then to imagine climbing up a mountain. I am good at climbing the mountain. Depending on the prior exercise, high knees are not the worst thing in the world. Then in a completely backwards twist, the ski downs start and so does the pain. In my mind I think this shouldn’t hurt. I’m skiing down the mountain I just climbed. Really I just have to let gravity do the work. But no, Shaun T has taken the fun out of skiing, making you feel like you are attempting to ski uphill, or down a hill with a disastrous coefficient of friction (that’s for my boy Sarz as he is most likely to actually read this.)

Cardio Abs again is like a distant memory even though it really didn’t happen all that long ago. I believe there is a severe lack of oxygen after Pure Cardio that prevents me from remembering Cardio Abs. Maybe I am blocking them from memory. Either way, what I can remember is an opening warm-up that isn’t awful by itself, just awful if it is following another workout. The floor exercises range from “not so bad” to “well, I did one, time for a break” to “Okay! I think I get what you are doing…oh…the drill is over?” Cardio Abs will make more sense when I perform Pure Cardio better. Pure Cardio will make more sense when that blasted warm-up is mastered.