MM,
After all the gumdo training last week, I decided to take a few days off and let my body recover. (I managed to get some more work done on my reiki manuals and curriculum.) Today, I felt I needed the running and the gym more than the do jang. So, Nathan and I headed out to the gym tonight.
First, we ran 1 mile to Yonge at Bloor. It was a little cold today, and I could feel it in my lungs. Because I have allergies, the phlegm seems to freeze up in my lungs and stomach in the cold. Thus, we running in the cold, I sometimes find it a bit hard to breathe. The only thing I thought of that helps is to occasionally breathe out of my hand. The warm air helps loosen up the phlegm. In any case, I did the run better than I expected in the cold weather. My time today was 8 minutes 31 seconds.
From Yonge and Bloor, we walked underground to the gym at Manulife.
We started with the following weight training exercises:
Leg lifts
Pull-ups (aka chin-ups, military and parallel)
Dips
Leg press
Hamstring flexor (called seated leg curls)
Hip adductors
Hip abductors
Chest press
Seated row
Bar pulls (I think this is called the lateral pull-downs; it works the muscles next to the scapulae on the back)
Pectoral fly
Shoulder fly
Shoulder lift (this is called the shoulder press)
Back extensor
Free weights:
Two shoulder exercises (no idea what they are called; someone showed them to me)
Situps (on a incline bench; worked out the obliques as well by doing double punches during the situp)
Bicep curls
Squats with weights
After the weights, I did 20 minutes of cycling while Nathan did 20 minutes of the elliptical. After, we did some push-ups. I do a variation I like to call “Master Kim push-ups” because I learned them from him. Basically, what you do is get into your standard push-up position with your hands beside you at chest level. Instead of extending your arms like in normal push-ups, you lift your whole body off the ground with just your hands and your toes, and then you bounce up and down on the arms keeping the elbows bent at 90 degrees. These were hard to get used to at first, but once you get used to the position you’re supposed to hold, it gets easy to do 100 of these. You know you are doing these properly if at the end of 100 your triceps are sore because that’s what these work out.
After the push-ups, we then stretched out and headed home.
Ten weeks four days left until 10k and black belt test. One week four days until our first training day. We supposedly need to attend twelve out of eighteen special training days, which run every weekend until the test. I guess my weekends are booked starting next weekend.
Oh, and check out the countdown timer after my signature. It’s cool. A lot of seconds until the test. Now, this is amusing to me. At 1.3 kicks per second (or one kick in 0.76 seconds), in 6,332,567 seconds (the countdown time left as I did this), if it was possible to keep kicking for that long 😉 , you could do 8,232,337.1 kicks.
BB,
Cassandrah
Your local black belt
Brigid’s Flame
