Insanity Workout Day 42: Please…Please…I Don’t WANNA Recover

2-15-10: Today was President’s Day, which of course I had off. Every year I spend this day reading a different biography on one of our great Presidents. Wouldn’t it be weird if I was like that?

What I will say is, Thank God I had the day off. My body resisted getting out of bed until 11:00. This was eleven hours of sleep. My body then told me that today would make an excellent candidate for actually taking a break to let me body recover. My body had a good point, but then the evil chanting of Shaun T resonated within my brain. Then his cruel and unusual logic started demanding a sacrifice (my body). “But Dave, today is the Recovery workout. Didn’t you just say you wanted your body to recover? Maybe the best way for your body to recover is to, I don’t know, do the workout designed to recover you??? Do not make my angry David. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” To the basement I went.

I do not know how the people on the video are not screaming in pain. They clearly are not doing the “recovery” exercises right. I appreciate truth in exercise films. In the case of this workout in particular, I envision the gym they are working out in to be in the midst of fire and flames, with the participants screaming in agony and pain as they are slowly and brutally tortured by Shaun T (which is almost an anagram for Satan (Satun…H). In this much shorter 25 minutes of hell, I still was drenched in the same level of sweat as the other workouts and my legs certainly hated me a lot more.

Amazingly, writing this at night, I do fell…good. I am suspicious of this good. I will know for sure tomorrow.

Finally, one of my friends and dedicated readers to this blog provided the scientific reasoning why eating right before the Insanity workout is not a bad thing. I was going to paraphrase, but he wrote it quite well, so I’m just going to quote him (and you will not trick me into eating bananas…you crafty S.o.B):

“While it is true that you mobilize more fat stores if you work out first thing in the morning before eating, this is generally done for aerobic exercise at say 60-70% of maximum heart rate. The type of exercise that you are doing has a definite anerobic part to it. That is, the intensity is so high that your body is using energy stores that do not use oxygen. Think of it like this, sprinting is anerobic, close to maximal intensity and you can only maintain this intensity for a short period before energy stores run out. Whereas with jogging you can maintain that pace for a while because the body is deriving its energy from the oxygen pathway. So, you can see that sometimes when Shaun T is asking for more, you are using up your glycogen (anerobic). Since your goal is not to just burn as many calories as possible, but to build muscle and get in shape, then eating before you workout might make the workout more beneficial for your goals.”