and it's Tuesday November end year fuck it all

 I am resetting my default mode that had been left switched on for a while which led me to gaining weight and going off track with everything that was my regularly programmed schedule.

Unless I don't get out of the funk that I am in and get back on the path that I used to walk on, my mood and spirit will never be as they were.

I have been ignoring myself for a while and I don't want to anymore. Life is not going to be as happy as it had been for a while now and things are dangling in the depressing atmosphere of uncertainty and deep loss which will be grieved forever and in between this aura of murky sadness I find myself riding the misery tidal pool and letting go, which is unlike me. 

I have to get a grip.

--

The hardest part of everything is waking up and I find myself cursing the world each morning.

exercise malfunction and no to self pity

On some days when my workout confidence is on an upswing, there are days when I find myself in a bit of a recession and this phenomenon isn't new or special for me. Everyone on a fitness journey experiences this time and again and no matter how often it happens it's always a bit unnerving, not to mention annoying.

Case in point my cardio session today. It's been a while since I went that length in cardio workout ever since my heel took a bit of beating with Achilles tendon. Today I amped it up a notch and did one of my favourite workouts which is a kneel to squat. An excellent exercise to assess your fluidity, range of motion, stability and strength since the entire body has to repeatedly in a single range of motion change from kneeling to squatting and back again. A wonderful torcher of an exercise indeed and today I found my legs shaking from the get-go. 

Not that I have gained weight but my quads and calves just didn't feel like they were in the mood to go through this motion and it almost felt I had to coax them to lift me up each time. 

When a few months ago I could do this exercise for a minute straight without having to lift myself much above the ground I found myself lifting a lot higher to give myself extra leverage to stand in a squat.

There are several reasons this could have happened apart from weight gain which was not the case.

At the beginning of this year where I was incorporating more cardio and functional workouts to my everyday sessions, the past few months have seen a decline in that since I resorted to a lower impact cardio routine due to my heel.

I have been concentrating more on strength routines and in fact, three days out of five workout days are solely strength workouts. 

Could be that this recent change in my exercise circuit has led to a lack of exercise or even lesser fluidity in regards to these strenuous workouts. 

It could also be that I have forgotten how to correctly do such workouts and my form is therefore lacking. 

Or it could just be that I have some muscle soreness from previous lower body workout days and thusly I couldn't engage my muscles as efficiently. 

Perhaps if I continue this exercise with the same regularity as before I would see some improvements.

Just because there are some slight changes in my fitness doesn't mean that I am on a declining path. Cardio isn't always jumping and lunging and intense HIIT sessions. In many ways, cardio is a lot of moving. Long brisk walks, being busy and on toes through the day and not being sedentary works much better than an hour of intense cardio. 

I know this sounds a bit like self-congratulatory affirmation but it isn't. Being regularly active throughout the day works much better than working out for a bit every now and then.

Not saying that one shouldn't work out but exercises have a way of benefiting and letting themselves shine only and only through consistency, which can be hard to come by, but being active through the day comes easy.

So what am I saying? 

That kneel to squats isn't the sole indication of my fitness. My daily activity which gets me clocking over 15k steps clubbed with strength training has helped me stay on my fitness path despite the heel injury for which I had taken almost over a month off from workouts. 

I mean I would love to get back to the same space of functionality as I was a few months ago and in time I will, but just because I am not there right now doesn't mean that I am lacking. It just means I am on a different road to the same destination. 

Onwards and upwards and consistent always!

coffee and abs

It is afternoon and my house is finally silent apart from the clacking of keys and whirring of my brain that probably thinks now is a good time for coffee and maybe it is but the question is what kind of coffee?
Should I make it in a Moka pot or how about an espresso from my lovely machine?
I have come across a really lovely bag of coffee beans and they're Columbian and roasted just to the right darkness which imparts a soft smokiness with a subtle tang and the resulting coffee isn't nearly as strong and bitter which maybe some people like but I personally cannot appreciate them.

So yes, coffee then and maybe I will make an espresso and dilute with some hot water to make my version of Americano with the crema still intact and sweetened just enough because it's afternoon and I feel indulgent.

--

My upper abs are sore and each time that I lean on my table to lay emphasis and conviction on my writing they hurt and now maybe I won't be doing any strenuous ab workouts anymore, not least because of how ineffective crunches really are and yet I still do them because, well, if I'm doing a whole body toning then by the heavens even my hair will get a workout.

Right, to the coffee machine then. 

them pains

I have overworked my legs after almost a week.
cardio exercises and badminton don't count.
Today was a leg day proper. Strength exercises all!
The kind that includes weighted squats, deadlifts, Bulgarian splits, lunges and a burnout pilates with ankle weights that include a plethora of pulses and raises and each movement is a whole new world of agony which makes itself felt every time I sit down.
Yes, glutes! I hear you.
I'm sorry

strength contusions

How is it that I am capable of feeling my strongest and weakest during the one same workout?
When I'm doing deadlifts with all that weight, almost 20 Kg's I feel like a freakin' Hercules and a minute after when during a burnout round I get on the ground for push-ups and begin grunting after the fifth I feel like I couldn't lift a pebble.

train to train

The thing about working out, and I often ignore this piece of advice myself is that you need to request your body instead of demanding it because when you push it the body will push back and that hurts.
You can't just overnight or in a matter of weeks or even a month reach some new heights of stamina or build extra endurance. These things are gradual and take their time as long as you're regular with your training and not pushing it.
Starting small and gradually building it, taking baby steps is necessary and there's no point in working extra or doing double duty workouts after a cheat day because they don't necessarily help, especially in the beginner stages.

Quick breathlessness is pretty normal and when you begin a workout always start with a few minutes of warm-up and even that warm up at times can make you breathless, but it's not a negative on your person because it's more about how quickly you recover from that stage of breathlessness and as you progress the recovery period gets shorter.

Often times the initial stage of work out can tend you make you tired, but it's surprising how the body adapts that when you do the same set of exercise the third time in that workout, it gets easier since the muscles loosen up, the body gets more nimble.

The first time I ever did burpees, I couldn't get my body to figure out the motion. I wondered as to how anyone can actually do it. It was impossible to suddenly crouch and have your body kick back both feet, push down a bit like a push-up and then like elastic pull those legs back into a crouch and jump up.
I mean how on earth could one do it, and I started with slow burpees and now proper burpees feel like the most natural thing. 

 So yes, you need to be hard on yourself, to get out of the comfort to workout 3-4 days a week but you needn't be hard on your body at all or else it does more harm than good. 

A nearly torn shoulder muscle and a busted quad is evidence to that. 

Also, all this shop talk is going to be useless if you're not eating right.
Adequate calories that come from all the food groups instead of a restrictive diet is absolutely critical. Don't skimp on the food. Eat clean and lean.
Nothing wrong with a sandwich or pasta as long as you're aware of what's going in it.
Try consuming mostly MCT fats and keep your macros in check, because everything is down to nutrition. What you eat is what you get and you can't get fit when your body isn't getting the nourishment it needs.

So basically, start small, don't over exert but keep your mind and body aware of the need to train at regular intervals because if once you're out of the loop, getting back into it is extremely hard.

agony in cramps, happiness bizarre

You know that cautionary voice? One which whispers from within, often from a cognitive part of your brain telling you not do certain things; like a word of Providence, a foresight.. that voice which was singularly amiss today as I decided to crank up my workout and add pilates to HIIT.

The reasoning was simple. That I needed some extra burnout rounds and do lower body workout slightly different from the usual resistance training and so I hopped on to the Pilates parade, because it's the one form of exercise that slowly burns and tires me in that sneaky way that pilates usually tend to, and I love the results it has to offer, so why not?

I included it to my workout in an AB AB format, where the former being pilates followed by the latter HIIT two times over, and dear gods, each time I'd haul myself off the mat to jump or kill myself in similar ways I'd feel the torture.

It came to a point where I'd developed a very special relationship with the mat and I'd to literally speak my self out of sticking to the floor. Like an inner monologue of reproachful cusses.

I've never known 30 seconds to be so long as when you're doing pulses, it feels like this might be it. This will be the day my hip socket will launch a rebellion..and here's the funny thing about exercising. That once you're done with it and finished a long stretch and cool down, you feel like maybe the workout wasn't as strenuous, of course, the soreness that comes after a while and mostly next day is enough to make you feel silly for such overreaching thoughts.

That cautionary voice does tend to take some time off, usually when I'm making bad decisions.
Will I resort to this workout again?
I think I will. It felt much better than the usual HIIT routines and I like to think I added a bit of variation, but perhaps I won't be jumping into it this week, in fact I might not jump at all this week.

fitnss misery

That's just it, the thing with doing a long stretch of cool down post workout; I dispensed with yoga for today and just did a ten minute stretching workout to cool down my body and it's always after such cool downs that your body comes to a state of total relaxation and you let yourself think that you could've worked out a bit more.
There's this sudden feeling of over confident fitness that you forget the last 45 minutes of extensive workout out, out of which the last ten minutes were spent flapping around like a beached whale on the mat berating yourself for this torture.
Might be something to do with happy hormones, so happy that they almost try to convince you that you can do better. lift heavier, push harder, jump higher, when in fact you'd reached a saturation point in terms of your physical level of exertion wondering why liposuction isn't nearly as popular as it should be.
Of course, once you've settled down with a meal and what not there are parts in your anatomy that begins a song of sorts. Ones twanged with ache and sore pains.
Lower back, that felt like a lubricated engine of unstoppable energy suddenly turns into a spinal cord that's been through a wringer.

Sometimes especially during mornings you feel like you want to pussy out of this whole debacle.
It happened to me today, not because it was what my body was telling me, but because I was making excuses to not sweat. It was laziness and I would have listened to it had I not remembered the doughnut from Monday.
I had to melt away all the fat it added to my body, but in fact I needed an incentive to be able to eat another one sometime soon in the future without worrying much about it.
Also, if I'd given in to laziness today I'd do it tomorrow as well and it could continue until I fell out of habit and started making excuses, and that's not something we can have, is it?
If there's a good thing going, efforts should be made to make it better.
There's a difference between ok and good, and though it might seem like a thin line reaching over to the other side needs be supplemented with a little bit more.

Everything you ever need is on top of the stairs and there are no elevators and escalators don't work. Arghh!!