Decisions, Decisions

The time for decision-making draws near.

No, I did not get up and run before work today. It was colder, and true, it's not Chicago Cold, but I don't think any of those people went running this morning either, so...

Instead, I went off to work, ran in the gap between that and rehearsal, and just completed my "other" portion of the workout. In this last bit, I entered everything onto my tracking sheet and realized that today is day 7. This is good, in that it means I've made it one whole week into this adventure, which is a bigger deal to me than it sounds.

This is challenging, however, because part of the new workout that I'm doing means that I want to do at least a 100-day burpee challenge. Now, technically this means that you start with one burpee on day 1 and increase by one each day. I find it ridiculous to do one of anything, so I've been doing ten. In fact, on everything but pull-ups, I've been doing ten. Now, as I near day 10, I have to think about day 11. What am I going to increase, what am I going to keep at 10, and what am I going to drop altogether?

A sad fact of working out is that routines eventually stop working. If you don't vary the workouts that you do, you will eventually plateau and burn yourself out. That's why all these new and exciting workout programs tout "muscle confusion," which involves doing a bunch of different motions so that all the muscle groups get work and nothing gets too used to what's going on.

Naturally, this means that simply doing the same thing (except one rep more) each day for the next 93 days will likely not do a whole lot for my general physique.

So, I'll have to make some choices. I like the burpees, and I like the push-ups, so I think I'll keep those. Everything else, I think, shall be rotated in. For example, Mondays and Fridays, I might do pull-ups and squats. Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'll break out the ab routine from P90X and gradually increase reps until I can actually do the whole 15-minute routine (which hasn't happened yet). Wednesdays, maybe throw in some weight work, with curls and shoulders. Saturday is my long run, so I probably won't need anything more than the burpees and push-ups for that one.

Actually, I like that schedule. Just made it up on the spot, but I think I'll keep it.

Decision made.