With the weekend snowboarding trip, which I'll write about in another post, I missed doing my Day 8 HST lifting on Saturday. In fact, my legs were not ready even yesterday to get back in the gym, so I didn't do day 8 until today, five days after my last workout, which part of me is bothered by because the whole point of HST is a regular increase in load. Will messing up my schedule ruin this round of HST? I don't know, but I'm guessing not. At least I'm hoping not! Either way I decided to keep going on it, which is what I did this morning.
I did the full workout again because it's just way more fun. I just really love to do full body exercises like Dead Lifts, Squats and Clean and Pushes on the same day because... well the intensity just rocks! I'm hoping I can keep this up, in fact I'd almost like to add even more intensity to my work-outs, but I know that I'll have to go step by step and cut back if I find myself on Day 9 or 10 with muscles or a body that is too fatigued. Once again, it's the balance of pushing the body, but not pushing it so much that it gets burned out. To do this, I'm going to keep my non-HST days at a low intensity and rest at least one day a week (even though I really don't want to). We'll see how it goes.
On Saturday night I fell off the low carb diet when the beer and mashed potatoes at the very fancy restaurant we went to just looked too good to pass up. Sunday, I continued to enjoy carbs, after all, I was still on vacation, and yesterday I just couldn't bring myself to go full non-carb yet. But I promised myself that I would start again today, a promise I've kept so far. God I love carbs. Saying goodbye to them is so hard and I can't wait to eat them again.
Okay, back to the workout this morning: I didn't eat anything before going because I figured I already had plenty of glucose stored up, and if I want to kick start myself back into ketosis, I need to burn it all off. And mostly, probably due to the glucose, I had a lot of energy this morning. My legs were still a tad tired from snowboarding, but they held up quite well. In fact even the usually challenging lunges went very well and felt easier than usual; my legs didn't start to really fail until the very end of my set of 20 (10 for each side). Arnold Presses, even after doing Clean and Presses, felt almost too easy, my incline dumbbell presses felt easier and I did 10 straight leg lifts followed by 10 curled legs with no problem. Basically, everything was a couple degrees of difficulty easier. It's a "No duh!" but carbs do wonders for athletic performance. I'm probably going to miss them.
After my workout I took my normal whey protein, glucose, vitamin, fish oil and creatine supplements, and I ate a few blueberries, but a bit less than I normally do (because I want to kick start myself back into ketosis). The rest of the day I plan to stay extremely low carb as well, and I'll do a P test tonight and in the morning to see (hopefully) if I'm back.
A couple of things that are interesting (at least to me):
1. I've noticed that my motivation to get back in the gym drops after two days of not going, which is one of the reasons I hate the two day rest period you are supposed to take when doing HST. Basically, I get up in the morning and rather than being excited to get dressed and hit the gym like I usually am, I actually consider not going. This morning I considered watching some TV shows that E doesn't like that I want to catch up while she is either out of the house or still asleep (we have wireless headphones I can use so the sound won't wake the other of us up). This lack of motivation seriously doesn't happen when I skip just one day; the motivation and excitement are still there. But for whatever reason after two days it's harder to get going. Add dropping off of your diet to the mix (like I did this weekend), and my motivation is even less. I have no idea why that is, but if this is typical behavior or a typical reaction then it must be really hard for out-of-shape or overweight people with bad eating habits to get themselves to the gym. And if this is a normal reaction, then when designing a work-out program for someone new, I'd want to do one that gets them in the gym at least every other day, but probably every day with only one or two days (split up) rest a week.
2. Despite falling off my low carb diet this weekend, I didn't put on any weight, or at least not as much as I would have expected given that I should be holding more water. Even after enjoying carbs for two days, my weight didn't go up. Did I somehow continue to loose weight even while doing carbs? Did I burn off the water doing my work-out this morning before I weighed myself again? Did I loose weight on Friday and Saturday when I was still on low carb, then gain it back on Sunday and Monday when I did eat carbs? Does it take more than two days of eating carbs to gain back the water weight? No idea, and frankly, my weight this morning could be a fluke, but yeah, weird. I really expected to have gained back at least a pound when I got on the scale this morning.
3. If I manage to get back into ketosis today, it will be interesting to see if I drop any water weight when I get on the scale tomorrow.
Weighed in at just under 236 with all nylon clothes.
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