HIIT It All

My legs and back are recovering from a heavy workout yesterday, so I took some time to put together a few more workouts for the coming weeks. Here's one that I think will offer a good challenge. 

I'm calling this one "HIIT It All", since it uses High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and it's aimed at hitting a little bit of every major muscle group. This one's a little less cardio-focused than some HIIT workouts, but I have a feeling it will still feel like cardio by the end.

HIIT It All uses Tabata-style training, with alternating sets of full-on effort and rest. The Tabata workout traditionally uses 20 seconds of active work followed by 10 seconds of rest. HIIT It All however uses the following sequence:

- 1 superset of "40 seconds on, 30 seconds off" for 2 exercises

- 2 supersets of "30 seconds on, 20 seconds off" for 2 exercises

- 3 supersets of "20 seconds on, 10 seconds off" for 6 exercises

- 2 supersets of "30 seconds on, 20 seconds off" for 2 exercises

- 1 superset of "40 seconds on, 30 seconds off" for 2 exercises

-after each group of supersets, take an extra minute of break time to setup for the next superset

Here's a table showing the overall setup. Of course, there are all kinds of exercises that could be used in a workout like this, but I threw some together that seemed to jive with the goal of doing a whole-body HIIT:

Total Supersets	Time	Exercise	Notes	Total Time (Cumulative)
1x	0:40	Push-ups + Knee Tucks	Follow each push-up with a knee tuck.	3:40 (3:40)
	0:30	Rest
	0:40	Pull-ups + Knee Raises	Follow each pull-up with 3 knee raises (add kipping only if needed)
	0:30	Rest	Add 1:00 to last set
2x	0:30	Plank w/ Arm Lifts	Alternating raises of arms in front	4:20 (8:00)
	0:20	Rest
	0:30	Sumo Deadlift	Add calf-raises in the second set
	0:20	Rest	Add 1:00 to last set
3x	0:20	HSPU	Hands-stand pushups (add kipping only if needed)	10:00 (18:00)
	0:10	Rest
	0:20	Cross Crawl	a.k.a. Bicycle Crunches
	0:10	Rest
	0:20	Band Pulls	Use heavy resistance band; pull down from above (a.k.a. band lat. pull-down)
	0:10	Rest
	0:20	Side-to-Side Hops with Knee Raises	Leap from left to right and then bring up left knee into a tuck and then alternate
	0:10	Rest
	0:20	Dips + Kicks	Dips with knees bent; at the bottom of each dip do a front kick with one foot.
	0:10	Rest
	0:20	Reverse Crunches	Legs as straight as possible
	0:10	Rest	Add 1:00 to last set
2x	0:30	Dumbbell Side Plank	Change sides on second set	4:20 (22:20)
	0:20	Rest
	0:30	Goblet Squats	Add calf-raises in the second set
	0:20	Rest	Add 1:00 to last set
1x	0:40	Curl into Shoulder Press		2:40 (25:00)
	0:30	Rest
	0:40	Farmer's Carry
	0:30	Deep Horse Stance Hold	Just to finish it out strong

I think the weight load for a workout like this should be pretty low (since all of the breaks are short). I'll probably use 62 lb. kettlebells for the squats and farmer's carry, 10 or 15 pound dumbbells for the side planks, and 25 lb. dumbbells for the curling exercise.

Let me know what you think (or if you have questions). 

This is me today

Did a double workout day yesterday. 

We hit the gym in the morning for deadlifts and seated rows followed by a metcon with TRX inverted rows and medicine ball work. We finished it off with a 2 km row on the rowing machines. 

Then I decided it would be fun to follow a heavy deadlift day with an evening run with a friend. We only ran about 5 miles, but I still got some blisters on my feet (probably time for new running shoes).

Today my everything hurts. 

See You Speak Toastmasters - Balance

Tonight's meeting of See You Speak Toastmasters will focus on the theme of "Balance". I'll be talking about using exercises to find physical balance as well as using meditation to find mental balance, but, most importantly for public speaking, I'll also be talking about finding balance in our speaking.

For instance, some filler words (like 'ah' and 'um') will not destroy your message, but too many of them most certainly will. Also, variations in intonation and pitch in your voice, gives your speech a balanced dynamic. Just the same goes for using variations in the tempo (or timing) of your delivery. There's a lot of balance to be found in our speaking.

For tonight's meeting, I'll share this quote from a great speaker:

“What is joy without sorrow? 

What is success without failure? 

What is a win without a loss? 

What is health without illness? 

You have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. There is always going to be suffering. 

It’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, 

That will define you.” 

― Mark Twain

Workout: Static Break Time

"Handstanding", a sculpture by Martin Heron

In keeping with my current goal in 2016 of pressing into a single-arm handstand from the floor, I've been incorporating a lot more static holds and balance movements into my workout routines. Here's one that we're going to rock out today that I'm pretty excited about and so I'm bringing it to you here, on A Cosmobiologist's Dream.

This workout, which I'm calling "Static Break Time" will include holds of handstands, L-sits, and horse-riding stance mixed with situps and pullups all done in supersets. Then the whole shebang will be followed with some deadlifts. Check it out below:

Static Break Time

4 Rounds of:

1:00 - Handstand

1:00 - L-sit

1:00 - Horse Stance

30 - Sit-ups

15 - Pull-ups

After all four rounds, 5x12 Deadlifts

Some notes: 

If holding a handstand for 1:00 is too difficult, this can be done with your feet lightly touching a wall for balance (it's much easier that way). 

L-sits can be done on parallettes, on dumbbells, or just on the floor. To the right is a picture of a woman performing an L-sit, for those who haven't heard of it.

Horse-riding stance, or horse stance, is pretty common in lots of martial arts. It's pretty much just standing with your legs straddled as though riding a horse. It's a great stance for standing meditations, but is also good for developing leg strength and flexibility. I like performing various depths of horse stances, from very wide and deep with full knee bends to very relaxed with slight knee bends and feet separated at only about shoulder width. 

Beautiful performance of a deep horse stance
(from "10 Most Effective Butt Exercises to Shape Up Your Body" at Lifehack)

Sit-ups and pull-ups are staples for my workouts (along with pushups and squats). I like to incorporate them fairly often. To keep them fun, I like to add lots of variations. For sit-ups, I'll add twists at the top, punches at the top, one leg straight, one leg of the floor, both legs off the floor, add in a side-to-side bend on the way up or down (or both), and more. Anything to keep it fun. Pull-ups are the same. You can add various leg positions, use different hand positions and widths, add kipping motions in for some or all of them, or, if you like a challenge, you can do them very slow and add in pauses on the motions going up or down. There are lots of fun ways to modify pull-ups!

I'm adding in the deadlifts at the end for some strength movements, but since I have the horse stances in there and so much static body positioning, I'm going with 5 sets of 12 reps of a lower weight for deadlifts on this one. 

StrongLifts has a great article on performing a Deadlift

If you give this workout a try and you like it, let me know! 

Here's to fitness and getting that one-arm handstand this year!

2016: Full Fitness Ahead!

This is me on January 1st, 2016. Lots of work ahead for my fitness this year!

It's now the 2,016th year of the Common Era! I've been feeling fairly fit these days, but I still have a lot of goals for improving my fitness in the coming year. The picture I posted above is me in our living room (also, our home gym!) on the 1st day of 2016. By the end of this year, I intend to lose a little body fat, eat more meat-free meals, get back to intermittent fasting, work on my muscular control to perform body weight exercises and transitional movements more gracefully, and I want to improve my flexibility and muscle tone. That could sound like a lot, but those overall goals should be pretty easy to attain.

2015 was a pretty huge year for me. I realized a lot of things about myself in the past year. For one of those things, I found that when I place my fitness as a top priority in my life I have greater control over my emotions and greater control over my productivity at work and at home (not to mention better sleep, better sex, and more pleasure in life). I've written some posts lately about my workout routines, including a recent one I created called Splosion, but now I thought I'd share some ideas of what my girlfriend and I have in store for our workouts in the coming year.

For starters, we're going to continue our home workouts in the mornings. We like to have our workouts early, before we go to work. It's nice to get it out of the way early, before anything can pop-up and steal our time in the afternoons or evenings. 

We've lately been programming our days so that we have a mix of workouts from home workout videos (like Les Mills Combat and P90X3), some workouts from Crossfit, as well as lots of workouts that we put together to include the equipment we have as well as the exercises we enjoy. Lots of our workouts will include dynamic stretching and foam rolling, one or two heavy lifts at low reps, and then lots of body weight exercises or high-rep sets of exercises using light dumbbells, barbells, and/or kettlebells. 

The workouts from Les Mills Combat are some of the best
cardio kickboxing workouts I've ever done.

The workouts that we program for ourselves tend to include lots of the basic body weight exercises (like pullups, pushups, situps, and squats), but we like to do lots of variations of those basic movements as well. Sometimes we'll do sets of high reps of one or two movements mixed with sets of low reps of others or we might do pyramid sets. There's no end to the types of workouts one can program (while still having lots of fun putting it all together as well!).

One of our favorite ways to add in some metabolic conditioning at the end of our workouts is to add in 4-12 minutes of Tabata training. The Tabata approach, using 20 seconds sets of action and 10 seconds of rest in between (though those times can also be varied), is a lot of fun and definitely works up a great sweat. If you haven't tried a Tabata workout before, you really should. It's a blast!

Kettlebells are awesome for Tabata workouts!

We're also planning on adding some more gym exercise to our routines this year. Our home gym is limited in how much weight we can use. I love bench pressing and deadlifting heavy weights, so we have to head to the gym for those lifts. Also, our gym has indoor rowing machines and heavy bags, both of which are some of our favorite tools for workouts. However, our gym also has a pool and we both need to work on our swimming this year. 

On top of hitting the workouts at home and at the gym, I want to transform my approach to exercise this year some more as well. I need more functional movements in my workouts and more of a focus on mobility exercises. I want to start aiming toward an approach for fitness that will make me feel strong now but which will allow me to maintain my fitness even as I get older.

For instance, GMB Fitness offers some workout programs and lots of articles and videos to help build better functional movement. I've found the information they have to share to be completely worthwhile and I highly recommend checking out their website. Also, I've recently discovered the work of Mike Fitch, who created the Animal Flow workout. We're looking forward to trying out some more of these movements and routines that GMB Fitness and Mike Fitch have put together to build better functional movement. For instance, here's a sweet video showing Mike Fitch performing some of his Animal Flow routines:

This blog post is pretty much just me laying out some general ideas of where we are right now in our fitness and where we want to go. We both have specific goals for the year though. For instance, here are three of my specific fitness goals for 2016:

- Perform relatively easy sets of 20 strict pullups

- Make smooth transitions from crow pose to handstand and single-arm handstand positions

- Perform a single set of 100 clap pushups


That's enough about what I have in store for 2016. What are your fitness goals this year? Do you have general goals for how you want to feel or what you want to be able to do? Do you have any specific goals for your fitness in 2016? 

Workout - Splosion

A little over two weeks ago, I shared my plans for workouts leading up until a couple days ago. We're now in the process of repeating those 14 days of workouts (making some changes along the way to keep things fun, of course). We're now back to a workout that I named "Splosion". I took a couple exercise ideas for pushups and squats that I found somewhere online (I forget where) and added in some single-arm kettlebell clean and presses. We've enjoyed the workout so much that I figured I'd share it here. Check it out below:

Splosion

3 RFT (rounds-for-time)

- 20 pushups, 10 second plank, 4 clap/plyo pushups

- 20 squats, 10 second hold in mid-squat position, 4 jump squats

- 34 single-arm KB C&P (17 per arm, alternating)

This workout is lots of fun. It's short and sweet but still hits some major muscle groups (it made us sweat pretty good as well). The combination of static holds before explosive movements as well as the round finishing move of the KB clean and press makes the workout a bit more challenging than it sounds, but it's still accessible to pretty much anyone with a decent level of fitness. Definitely get in a good warm-up before you do the workout. 

If you want to try Splosion but don't have clap pushups yet, then try a plyo pushup (push to the top of the pushup position quickly and let your fingers leave the ground a little bit). Also, a dumbbell could easily be used in place of a kettlebell for the C&Ps.

Three rounds of these exercises will definitely get you sweaty. We're in the 11 to 12 minute range right now, but are looking to take that down to 8-10 minutes. If you try this workout, let me know and tell me your time!

Two Weeks of Fun Workouts

Monday	“Severin” 50 pullups - strict 100 pushups – hand release Run 5 K	C&P + Thrusters
Tuesday	The Warrior	Combat
Wednesday	“Splosion” 3 RFT 20/10/4 of: squats – squat hold – jump squats pushups – second plank – clap pushups then 34 single-arm KB C&Ps	Core + 100 dips
Thursday	Combat	Isometrix
Friday	Core + 100 KB Swings	PAP Upper
Saturday	Isometrix	PAP Lower
Sunday	Deadlift + 5RFT - 5-10-15-20 Pullups-pushups-situps-squats	Core

I don't normally share my workouts routines online, but I like the current plan I have for the next two weeks. You can see that plan above. It mixes together a Crossfit Hero workout called Severin with some of my own bodyweight workouts (like the one I call "Splosion", which mixes an approach to squats and pushups that I found online with some kettlebell clean and press moves) as well as some of the workouts that can be found in the Beachbody collection. If you're interested, here's a quick breakdown of the workouts:

Severin
This one is pretty fun. It's 50 strict pullups followed by 100 pushups (with hands coming off the ground at the bottom, resting the chest momentarily) and then a 5 kilometer run. The goal is to work up to doing the workout with a 20 lb. weight vest. 

The Warrior
This is one of the workouts from P90X3. It's a fun mix of sets of exercises for the upper body, cardio, core, and lower body. The Warrior is one that definitely builds up some sweet. 

Splosion
This is a routine that I put together. I found a suggestion online to mix squats with squat holds and jump squats as well as pushups with plank holds and plyometric pushups. I do it as 20 reps followed by 10 seconds of holding and then 4 reps (so 20 squats followed by 10 seconds holding a low squat followed by 4 jump squats). Each set will see this 20-10-4 progression for squats and then for pushups and then I add in 34 reps of single-arm kettlebell clean and press. I then do three rounds for time (3 RFT) of this progression.

Combat
For these days, we do any of the cardio kickboxing workouts from the Les Mills Combat series. Lots of punching, kicking, knees, and elbows (which I throw in, since they're not included in the workouts).

Core
This is a 10 minute core routine from the Les Mills Pump series. I've done lots of core routines over the years, but this one is by far one of the best. It targets the upper abs, lower abs, obliques, transverse abdominis, and the lower back. It's a great workout for targeting the core. I have either bench dips or kettlebell swings added in on the end of my core routines a couple times in this two week progression (just to add some more to the workout!).

Isometrix
This is another of the P90X3 workout routines. Isometrix targets the core and includes lots of balance exercises. The exercises alternate from planks and down-dogs of various kinds with standing balance poses (mostly from yoga). I feel like balance is a super important component of fitness that too few people focus on. It's definitely worth running through this routine from time to time.

Other Resistance Workouts
I also have a couple of workouts in this progression that include deadlifts, pullups-pushups-situps-squats, barbell clean & press, and barbell thrusters. These exercises are a great mix of compound movements with bodyweight exercises.

PAP Upper and PAP Lower
These workouts are from the P90X2 series. The PAP part of the names comes from post activation potentiation, a way to exercise where a heavy load is placed upon a muscle followed by lighter loads and fuller ranges of movement. Although I don't personally think the P90X2 workouts do a great job of incorporating PAP, they're still fantastic workouts. Each workout is composed of four rounds each of two supersets of 4 exercises that target either the upper body or the lower body. These are hour-long workouts that end in a heavy sweat, but they're a lot of fun as well!

Like I said, it's not usually my thing to share my workouts online, but if you dig these and want some more info, feel free to ask.