Every 4 to 6 weeks, I changed my exercise routine. Sometimes I make small changes, sometimes I make bigger changes. Each change is a 4 to 6 week experiment. Last month, my experiment involved creating workout circuits that were between 2.5 and 5 minutes long. In many of them, I combined two different exercises into one to work more of the body at one time. Exercise mash-ups, you might say.
It was a way to get the small circuits that I'm always promoting here to the next level. If you have five minutes (and who doesn't have five minutes?) you can get in a workout.
Here's what I found out from doing them for a month.
These circuits are tough and you should probably only do one or two of them a day. We were doing 4 or 5 of sometimes 6 of them in a morning. It was possible and we did great for the first two weeks but after that, our bodies were beat up. Each morning after that was a struggle and we had to start easing back on the speed and weight of the workouts and lower the number of circuits we were doing.
If you're going to do more than a couple of these a day, you better be eating right and getting plenty of rest.
The nice thing about them though is that you are using so much of your body to do them that if what you're looking for is a starting point in your fitness journey that doesn't take up much time, these things would work nicely.
I'm planning on doing them again in September or October and I'm going to be making a change to the plan. I'm going to either take Wednesdays off or dedicate that day to stretching. I want to see how it would go to to do a 2 on, 1 off, 2 on, 2 off schedule with these. Would that be enough of a midweek recuperation that we could go full speed all month?
Only one way to find out. =)
My exercise room is like an evil laboratory where I experiment on myself and those foolish enough to join me at six in the morning.
I only have one person that has stuck with me over the last two years. I call her Drill Sergeant because she's tough. Everyone else has gone home crying and never come back. When people ask me about my class, I give them a very clear disclaimer that it's brutal. Some try it anyway. Some last for a week. Some for a month. In September, Drill Sergeant will have been working out with me for 2 years. Both of us would love to stop but neither of us is going to quit before the other one does so we're stuck and just have to suck it up and keep showing up.
This last month pushed us both to our limits. This week is recovery week and it's not going to be like my other recovery weeks. I am going to actually try to let us both recover from the last month. I'm switching next month's workout too. It will still be tough but not like last month. This last month, the individual exercises really weren't that tough for the most part (except for the idiotic place where I put "Tiger Prowls" - good gawd! what the hell was I thinking there?). It was tough over the long term. It was taxing to the whole body to the point where neither of us wanted to show up but ego kept us going.
That's not what you want to do to your body over a month. It can actually lead to burn out, over training, lasting fatigue, reduced immune function, possible injuries, and a beat up pissy attitude.
For me, I want to look forward to exercising and I want to feel better for having done it.
Now, all that said and now that it's over, I'm glad I did the experiment and I'm glad that I didn't quit. It was extremely tough on my body and my mind but there is something to be said about coming through to the other side. Like "Hell Week", which is meant to push people to their limits, this was similar where the first two weeks wore the body out and the next two weeks were "Hell Week".
I realize that all of this is probably not going to encourage anyone to try these things but it would be a completely different story if you only did 1 or 2 circuits a day and you took a couple of days off or immediately changed your workouts if you started to feel the burn out. We did 4 to 6 circuits a day, 5 days a week, for 4 weeks. It's too much but you know what I say: "Sometimes you don't know where the edge is until you've stepped over it."
Last month, we crossed the line. We lived through it though and in a couple of months, we're going to try it again in a revised fashion to see how close we can come to the edge without going over it this time.
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