Weight training

Well I’ve been fairly busy the past two weeks, but I have been exercising – but it was a choice between doing the exercise or writing about exercise, and I chose to do it (because I didn’t have enough time to do both if you see what I mean).  I got fairly depressed 2 weeks ago about my whole life’s inertia so I’m back on my bipolar meds which hit me like a train last week (the first week always does – stupid side effects) but it’s settling now, and this time around, I’ve found I can actually tolerate exercise on them (last time I just sort of sat around the house staring into space, although last time I was taking them to get rid of hypomania).  I feel like it’s impossible to guess what effect they’ll have on different phases.

One thing I’ve been doing these past two weeks is incorporating a bit of weight training into my at-home routine, using the now-elderly York weights set (I use the two narrowest bars as I don’t have a bench for using the widest one).  I wanted to pick the brains of WeeManMike but anyone else is free to comment if you’ve got an opinion on this:

Which school of thought do you subscribe to – starting at a high load (so less reps) and tapering down to a lower load (with more reps) or starting at a low load and increasing weight as you reduce the number of reps?  I took my cousin’s advice and I started at 6 reps with the 4.8kg, then 8 with the 2.2kg, then 10 with the 1kg, now I’ve moved up to 10 with the 4.8’s, then 15 with the 2.2’s, then 20 with the 1kgs (I gradually built up to it over the last 2 weeks), and it’s giving good results but it feels like I’m doing it backwards!  What’s the better way out of the two opposing schools of thought?

Update after re-reading: Oops, meant to say, that’s the number of bicep curls I’m doing.  I’m also doing tricep lifts (from a starting position behind my head) that I found on Youtube, where you take one weight in both hands and lift it from that start point.  I was doing 8 of those with the 2.2’s and 10 with the 1kgs, but I made very fast gains with that one and am now doing 8 of the 4.8kg weight and 10 of the 2.2kg weights and 12 of the 1kg weights on the triceps.

I am also doing side lifts with the 2.2’s (1 arm either side, raise outwards to the position you’d have your arms in to do a star jump), of which 8 reps.

I am also doing overhead lifts with 6 reps of the 4.8’s and 8 reps of the 2.2’s (because I do these last when my arms are tired).

And lastly, the one I’ve been doing since January, is where I attach the 1kg weights to my feet (they loop over as they’ve got velcro straps – they’re not York weights) and from a seated/knees bent/pointed toes position I raise my feet (flexing at the ankles) to build the shin muscles.  It’s probably a terrible long term plan but it has increased the total number of calf raises I can do.

WeeManMike suggested squats with weights, anything else I can incorporate or is that plenty?

Pilates for cross-training

I like to practise pilates when I’m not skating, which is the last two days (because I had skate problems that haven’t been solved yet – the skates should have arrived Wednesday but I got an email this morning to say they were dispatched THIS MORNING for Tuesday delivery boo).

Usually I watch videos but sometimes I either don’t have time or it’s not appropriate, in which case I tend to mix it up and do a different routine each time but here’s some of my favourite moves:

Plank – I like to use it as a cool down at the end of a workout so I can center myself and work my core muscles in a static way.  I’ve never really understood the whole isostatic exercise debate (in terms of whether it’s good or bad) but I figure it can’t really harm to include a couple of static moves within my active program.

Crunches – I don’t do them the normal way, though, I suppose roll-ups would be a better name for what I do, because I focus on working my stomach muscles from top to bottom.

That one where you pull your arms behind you then extend them again over and over again that looks a bit like you’re about to do jazz hands – I like that one for working the muscles around my shoulderblades, and since I’ve been including it, I haven’t had shoulder or neck pain after arm workouts.

Calf raises – These are my absolute favourite favourite because they have totally reshaped my bandy legs!

I get all my Pilates input from Blogilates (the Youtube channel) because I find Cassey to be an excellent instructor and I always seem to find it within me to push myself a bit further with these videos, which is more than I can say for most of the workout videos I’ve tried.  Wow I wish I could be as knowledgable about general exercise as Cassey is, but who knows, maybe she can’t skate?

What’s your favourite moves?

New Skates On The Way

So I’ve been searching for a perfect pair of skates for long distance.  Conventional wisdom says speed skates, with their larger wheels and correspondingly larger price tag.  I was on the fence about them for several reasons:

Speed skates are heavy.  Bigger wheels mean more weight.  On top of that, on a long distance skate I would need a full set of spare wheels.  Since the wheels weigh more and are larger (think scooter wheels), I would be carrying significantly more load.

The biggest reason I didn’t want a pair, however, is safety.  Let’s return to the scooter analogy; stopping in speed skates is like trying to stop a scooter that your foot is attached to, while wearing another scooter on the other foot, neither of which have brakes or handlebars.  This is fine for racing and pre-planned marathons and any kind of downhill skate where there’s a safe amount of space at the bottom to stop on.  However, the world isn’t built for skaters, and those speed skates with their 100mm wheels can get over 40mph on hills.  Trying to stop on a hill (or at top speed in competitive skating) takes a couple of hundred metres in speed skates.  If I wanted to skate Land’s End to John O’Groats (end to end of the UK) (and I’m not saying that I’m certain I want to do that until I can skate 100 miles; I like my goals to be *barely* achievable, not utterly ridiculous), I would have some parts of Scotland where I’d be in serious danger going down steep inclines with no safe way of quickly stopping.  I don’t think kneepads would quite cut it.  I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to plan a 100 mile route without running up against at least one steep hill in any given direction.

The deciding factor was that yesterday, I skated 3 miles and somehow flayed the lower half of my calf without noticing until I got home and peeled my sock off.  This for me was the last straw with these skates; I’m forcing them to do things they’re not designed for.  I decided comfort was going to be my number 1 priority in my new pair of skates.  Today I couldn’t skate at all because my leg will just get worse, so I made do with some stretches and squats this morning, and I plan to do some pilates when I get home.

So I’ve finally settled on a pair of quads.  I like quads (non-inline skates) because they’re more maneuvrable, meaning I can do more of the same things I do in figure skating.  I ordered them last night from ebay and they should arrive tomorrow.

When did OK become good enough?

Have you noticed how in some areas of life, we are rewarded for making less and less effort whilst at the same time, our expectations of ourselves go down?

Maybe it’s just me.

I feel like everywhere I look, people are congratulating themselves on making a half-hearted attempt to do something but not actually achieving anything. I see areas in my life where I tell someone I’ve failed to do something, and they say “well at least you tried.” No! Not good enough! I want to be accountable because I think I lower my standards when people around me lower their expectations. Perhaps this explains why skating is such a lonely activity.  I think most non-team sports and exercise is lonely if there’s no-one around who gets you.

Yesterday, I tried to go out for a skate, got as far as the front door, saw that it was drizzling and had to leave it. Why? While the rain doesn’t really bother me, my skate wheels don’t get enough friction on the ground and start sliding sideways – a bit like when you go to the ice rink and you leave your skate guards on your blades – then I don’t have any control over where the skates go, and they don’t roll forwards so much as slide all over the place.

The solution is to find a more appropriate pair of distance skates, and I’ve been looking everywhere but there’s nothing in my budget at the moment, so in the meantime I can’t skate on wet surfaces. At all.

Yesterday that meant I didn’t get out to skate. What I should have done was change into some different shoes and go for a brisk walk or a light run to get my cardio on. Instead I didn’t even do any stretching or pilates, I just sat at home and worked on my laptop, which I do far too much of anyway!

This morning I got annoyed with myself. I started to question when it was that my brain started accepting the same lame-assed excuses that everyone else seems happy with. When did I stop challenging “okay” performance and stop demanding excellence from myself?

From now on, okay isn’t good enough. Acceptable is unacceptable. I want to be excellent. I think this is the underlying reason why I started this blog – if it’s written down, I will feel more accountable, and I can look back on my performance and see whether I’m really making as much effort as I think I am, or whether “it’s okay, at least you tried” culture is sapping my will to take action.

Two Miles On Eight Wheels

It was a frosty January Saturday afternoon, the thin sun was bringing light but not warmth, and the trees were black fingers of dormant life.

I walked down the hill to the start of the cycle path, carrying about 5 kilos of skates in my hands, then took my time putting them on, fastening them tightly, putting my shoes in my backpack, before I unsteadily started off.

I’ve been a professional ice skater in the past, but I haven’t set foot on the ice since 2010, when a back injury (non-skate related) left me totally unable to walk for nearly 6 months.  It was a very, very long road to recovery, with several terrifying relapses, but by the middle of 2014 I was back to normal again physically.  For some reason, however, I couldn’t seem to go ice skating.  The injury was nothing to do with ice or skating, and I’d been doing exercise every single day for years, varying its intensity, depending on whether it was a walking day or a bad day.

I just couldn’t seem to muster the …. something.  It wasn’t energy or drive, I don’t know what it was.  Anyway, I haven’t been ice skating since.  By the end of 2014 I was getting quite dismal about it, and then my mother died, and my husband gave me my Christmas present a week early.

It was a pair of inline (non-ice) skates.  These were a particular type called aggressive inlines, which means they’re heavier and the wheels have less grip than normal inlines, but they’re better for doing skate park tricks on.  Since my particular area of ice skating had been figure skating, they were just what I needed at the time.

I used them twice over the Christmas period then never got back to them until this week (mental health issues caused by losing my mother then my father within 5 months of each other really messed me up for a good while and the skates were set aside in favour of pilates and walks and climbing a few mountains).

That changed this week, when I decided (out of a long-growing feeling) that I was going to get fit enough to skate 100 miles.  I’ll need a different type of skates (which I’m currently researching) and I’ll need a route, but for now, I’m using what I’ve got.

So this afternoon I put my skates on for only the second time this week (the first time, I managed 0.6 wobbly miles), and I just decided to go.  Unfortunately, the footpath had other ideas.  I got a mile up the path then I was skating over gravel.  I don’t know if there’s another type of skate that can eat gravel for breakfast but with my 80mm wheels I didn’t have much luck and I was just stepping in my skates, pretty much the same as when you have to do a manual re-surfacing on an outdoor ice rink (as you do).

I got 100 metres on the gravel then I decided for the sake of my wheels that this was not the best thing to do, and I turned back.  The return skate always seems shorter than the outward one, and I felt like I’d barely got warmed up but now it was time to go home.  At the end of my skate, instead of stopping before the hill at the end of the cycle path, I crouched lower on my skates and attacked it with gusto.  When I got to the top there were two cyclists pushing their bikes and I would have made a joke but that would have involved more oxygen than I had at the time.  I took a moment to resume breathing, then decided to skate onwards back to my house.  Again, the surface of the road and pavement varied from perfect to shocking, and when I got in, I looked up my route on Google maps.  2 miles.  That’s my best distance so far.

I downed a glass of tomato juice and stuffed a few handfuls of peanuts in my face to restore fluids, protein and vitamins, then felt decisive so I started this blog.  Skating is a very solitary sport, so I want to use this blog to record all my training and anything I come across that’s to do with skating (ice. inline or quad) or fitness in general, because I’ve got another blog but it’s already packed with topics and I just wanted a place where I could obsess over skating and fitness and hopefully meet like-minded people who could talk about skating, fitness, goal-setting, exercise, training and other awesome stuff with me.