INSANITY Day 1

This was supposed to publish last night, but for some reason it saved as a draft instead. So just pretend it worked.


Since my horse life right now is pretty dull I'm going to start writing about my INSANITY work outs. There is a reason this ties into horses though: Rider fitness. There is a whole Yahoo forum dedicated to this topic. Why? Because your horse can be as fit as can be and if you are a sack of potatoes up there you will hurt or, at the least, hamper your horse. To me riding in general, and endurance in particular, is a deal between horse and rider. Each has a job to do and if one fails the other needs to pick up the slack. I don't enjoy doing Gem's job for her and I know she doesn't enjoy doing mine for me. If I get farigued at mile 10 and start flopping around and riding poorly she will need to work harder to stay balanced and her risk of injury, fatigue and getting pulled at a vet check goes way up.

So in the interest of rider fitness, trying to get toned back up and entertainment, I bring you my 60 day journey through the INSANITY work out. Today was day 1: Fitness test.

Sounds easy enough. Eight 1 minute long exercises. Do as many of each as you can and log it. 8 minutes. How hard could that be?

I wrangled the hubby into doing it with me. Misery loves company, right? We put our shoes on (a recommendation from my parents who lent me the program), loaded up the disk and locked the dogs out of the room. Let's go!

There was a brief introduction and then a warm up. In my mind a warm up is a slow, easy introduction to the activity to get the blood flowing and the muscles, ligaments and tendons loosened up. What I got was a burning hell of a first 15 minutes that left me gasping for air Amanda wondering why I wanted to do this. And that was just the warm up.

Now on to the actual test. There is Shaun T leading it with a skinny Asian woman to his right and buffed out white guy to his left. I wanna look like she does so good job in picking your people Shaun T.

First up: switch kicks. I'm not going to make this forever long with each description, but if you are interested just ask and I will explain. 1 minute. Go! I got about 15 seconds into it before I landed wrong, twisted my right ankle (which gives out on me randomly anyway) and fell to the ground. Great start. The good news was that the break this gave me allowed my heart to slow back down to a rate that sustains life again. I managed 60 total, the hubs 82.

My oxygen deprived brain envisioned a nice long break between test. Ha! 15 seconds later he was describing the next move. Power Jacks. I was back into the groovea my stayed on my feet for 35, hubs did 43.

I was hot. We put the ceiling fan on. Step 3: Power knees. I want to spend a moment on these. With core tight being your right knee up to above hips, them left, then right etc.... Until you want to die or 1 minute is up. Guess which came first? I did 47, hubs 50.

Power jumps: 30 for each of us. I giggled a bit at my lack of coordination with this.

Globe Jumps. Well at least we got rid of the word power finally. But my thighs were getting very jello like at this point and the word jump could have also been left out. But no. Jump we did: first to the right, then back, left, front. Making a large box. I enjoyed this one as much as anyone can enjoy not being able to breathe, feel their legs or see straight anymore. 5 and 8.

Three left. Suicide jumps which I didn't do very well at. My thighs were pSt protesting and into flat out refusing to work anymore without their OSHA mandated break, but I squeaked out 6 to the hubby's 16.

Finally finished with jumping we moved on to push up jacks. Do a push up and as you go down your legs do a jumping jack like maneuver. I spent the first part doing it backwards and the second part realizing that I was weak enough that a regular push up is hard even without the stupid leg thing. 9 to 15.

And one last minute to go and then I can collapse into a lazy heap once more. Low plank obliques. Oddly enough I actually did enjoy these and since my legs were now resting I did fairly well at 38 to his 30. Go me.

That's it. I am sitting on the floor wondering how I am going to get back up to eat dinner. Or go to bed. Maybe I will just sleep here tonight.

Posted with Blogsy