Exercise update, Week 12

This was a bit of a slow week in terms of exercise. As expected, I didn't manage to get in any exercise at all from Monday to Wednesday because of the prayer conference every night from 7:30pm to 11pm, where I would go straight to church from work and then be too tired at night to squeeze in a midnight workout. But once my evenings freed up a little, I manage to then do 4 straight days of exercise although I didn't push for most of the workouts because I was still feeling fatigued and also didn't want to be aching for the badminton tournament.

This is how this week looked.

• Monday: Rest day
• Tuesday: Rest day
• Wednesday: Rest day
• Thursday: 45 minutes badminton
• Friday: 7.56km run
• Saturday: 2 hours badminton
• Sunday: 35 minutes gym

I haven't played badminton for a very long time and the last time I played competitively was in highschool, so imagine my surprise when I found out my dad had signed me up to play doubles with him in a tournament for our housing area. I tried having a warm up game on Thursday and realised that focusing on gym workouts and running, has affected my flexibility in my shoulder rotations. I honestly played like crap and got thrashed by my dad who is 60 years old...

You can probably guess what happened in the tournament. Only 5 teams signed up for Men's Doubles, and so each team got to play 4 games each, round robin. We lost all 4 games. Badly. Enough said...

I was rather happy with Friday's run because I managed to fulfill another one of my fitness goals for the year - to run 5km in less than 25 minutes. The pace that I maintained over 7.56km would have allowed me to run the 5km in under 22 minutes. My revised goal for December is to run it in under 20 minutes and that will definitely challenge me throughout the year.

On Sunday, I was aching badly from the badminton tournament - almost every body was in terribly pain...my calves, quads, hamstrings, glutes, lower and upper back, shoulders and abs. This is what happens when you push in a sport which you haven't played for a long time, working muscles in ways they are not used to. I forced myself to go to the gym and focused on the only body part which wasn't aching - my chest.

So I did a pure chest day for the first time ever. 3 sets of bench presses, 3 sets of incline bench presses, 3 sets of dumbbell flys, and then impulsively ending on 3 sets of explosive clap push ups. I couldn't even finish 10 reps each for the push ups because it hurt so much and only reached 8 reps for the final 2 sets but I definitely pushed my chest muscles, as well as a bit on my triceps.

In the coming week, I'm going to be in a church camp for 4 days, and so I'll need to adapt my workout routine depending on my commitments there. Based on the pictures, the gym looks pretty awesome for a hotel gym and I'm looking forward to trying it out. The pool also looks rather interesting because the walls are made of glass and if I wear my thong speedos, everyone will have a great view...

Fortunately, I didn't. :)

Categories: Health