The Elephant in the Room

Or rather, in my case, on the treadmill. Since part of my offseason cardio now includes two 30-minute HIIT sessions post-workout, I have decided to try to go back to my running days in an attempt to rekindle some sense of athleticism. Ironically, I used to be a fairly decent runner, both in endurance and speed. By no means was I Flo-Jo or Prefontaine, but I would consider myself an above-average runner. That's not exactly the case nowadays. I literally sound like an elephant on the treadmill during my minute-long sprints (and I use the word 'sprint' very judiciously, as I'm not exactly moving all the fast despite that my body thinks otherwise). Yes, I am "That Person" that everyone dreads when they get on the treadmill. I will say, though, those workouts definitely spark my metabolism because I'm freaking starving when I'm done with them.

My workouts continue to be pretty good. I still feel like I'm working on building my strength back up, though. That could also be becasue I'm still feeling really scattered in my workouts, with no real way to track progress yet. So, I finally took initiative today and printed out a new template for 5x5's and will go back to old faithful until we devise a new plan for me. I'm going to have to be careful with squats and deadlifts, since I've fallen into the bad habit of compensating for my injury. My plan is to use my warm up sets to really focus on re-establishing good technique. I know this will mean I'll have to pull back on my weights altogether for those exercises, but it'll ultimately be worth it. I was able to solidfy the techniques earlier in my offseason last year, and it made a world of difference. It wasn't until close to the end of the offseason, when my injury reached its worse, that progress came to a screeching halt (probably due, in part, to the deterioration of my form on those exercises).

One thing I love about this sport is that every year I seem to learn new things about my body and what works best and what things I need to avoid. No matter how long I've been doing this or how well I think I know myself, I always manage to learn something new. I probably couldn't see it 6 months ago, but I'm sure that a good percentage of why I stopped making good progress towards the end was due to a breakdown in my lifting form because of my injury. And that only motivates me even more to do exactly what Mike tells me to do and make rehabbing my ham/glute a priority...because I really can't wait to get back to squatting and deadlifting for real. Not being able to train the way I want to certainly made me realize that I do this sport because I genuinely love to train hard...looking great on stage and having fun competing are fringe benefits.