So I’ve been gone for a while. After my injury, I just haven’t gotten back into p90x. Now, I’m in the process of buying and moving into a house. It’s a big step for us, and a big investment. We are planning to setup a “p90x room” where we can both do p90x. What that means is, until we move, I’m probably not going to be doing p90x, but once we move in, I’ll do p90x again, starting again at day one.

Until then, I won’t be posting.

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I haven’t been around lately because I’ve been wallowing in self-pity over my shoulder. I’ve been really hard on myself, and I recognize that, so this is my reconciliation with myself over my shoulder.

The shoulder is doing better. Actually much better, but it’s still not 100%. A few changes have happened since I last updated. First, I’m taking a break from the big circus school for the summer. This means, I’m only doing aerial 2 days a week until the fall. I’m okay with this as it will give me time to concentrate on home buying, p90x, and other things that are happening in my life.

Secondly, I’m not going to do trapeze for a while, until Eric is back in town. This will give my shoulder lots of time to heal. Trapeze is far harder on your shoulders than rope. As my shoulder starts being stronger again, I may add a little trapeze in, but for now, rope all the way. As a side note to that, I’m working on a new routine that will be on the rope, so this gives me something to concentrate on. I’ll be doing the routine to “Particle Man” by They Might Be Giants. This is my kid-friendly acts.

And for those of you who are US-based, over the Holiday weekend, I’m going to be in McMinnville, Oregon for the Northwest Tandem Bike Rally. We are going to be riding about 80 miles over a two day period. It should be alot of fun, but since we haven’t ridden all season, it’s going to be very difficult too. Oh well, it’s a way to kick off the cycling season well, and it will be fun. I cleaned the bikes last night, and I’m going to oil them down tonight in prep for driving down to McMinnville tomorrow.

I’ll have my laptop with me, and if the hotel we are staying at has Internet, I may post while I’m there. I’m thinking about getting a cheap, portable video camera (like the flip video or something) to capture some video from the ride.

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I’ve been crazy busy lately. I’m trying to find and buy a home since my lease is almost up and I’m at a point where I want to own, not lease.

So much of my time has been taken up with that, and all the things that go into that. I have been, mostly, doing my exercises though I needed to take two days off.

To give a quick recap from the last time I posted:

Day 7 was a rest day (Saturday)
Day 8 was chest and back again. Had more consistant results across the board with a few moderate increases (Sunday)
Aerial Day (Monday) so no p90x
Day 9 Plyometrics. Have I mentioned that I really don’t enjoy this exercise? I know it’s good for me, but I hate it. I do it, but I hate it. (Tuesday)
Aerial Day (Wednesday) so no p90x
Aerial Day (Thursday) I had a make up class from earlier in the week, so no p90x. There were only three of us in class that day, and they were all advanced people so I learned new stuff, including this one really awesome drop called the double star where you spin around twice in the air before stopping at the bottom of the rope
Friday and Saturday, I was just lazy as all hell so I took the days off
Day 10 Shoulders and Arms (Sunday) - jumped all of them up to the harder blue band. I feel like I’m going to have to go buy the black band soon.
Aerial Day (Monday) so no p90x.

So, here is the bad news. During class last night, I hurt my left shoulder. I’m massively annoyed by this for many different reasons. I’m going to do a video post tonight to explain everything, but yeah needless to say, I’m not a happy camper.

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I know it’s late, and I haven’t been posting lately. It’s been a bit crazy around here, but I promise a proper post later today

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Combined post for days 5 and 6 since I did my day 6 early this morning.

Day 5
So day 5 was legs and shoulders. I’ve done this one before and it was a good workout. I hurt my toe on Wednesday night so I wasn’t able to do the toe-roll lunges because it hurt too much. The rest of the moves I was able to do pretty easily. In general, and it’s a difficult but rewarding workout. Since my legs don’t get nearly as much work as my upper body in my normal life, It’s good to be able to spend some time on them.

Abs were abs, hard, but I finished them all. I’m not as sore today as I was the last time I did ab ripper x, so that’s good.

Day 6
This morning, I woke up and did Kempo X. It was pretty much what I expected. I used to take kempo for my PE credits in High School (long time ago), so I remember alot of the drills we used to do. Also, I knew how to do most of the punches. I did, however, feel VERY uncoordinated when trying to do the hook/upper cut combination. I’d be fine on one side, but when I’d try to switch to the other side, I kept getting mixed up. I’m sure it’ll get easier with time, but wow.

Also, again, since legs aren’t usually a big thing for me, the kicking quickly tired me out. One move that I miss doing from my Kempo class, that, unfortunately, wasn’t in the Kempo X video is a series of 3 side kicks, Low, Middle, and High. I remember doing those and enjoying them.

This is the end of week one! I feel proud that I made it through almost all of them, though I’m a bit annoyed with myself that I skipped one of the ab ripper x workouts. Such is life though and I roll with it.

I’m going to try to take pictures tomorrow, though we are throwing a party so it may not happen until Sunday. Also, it’s measurement and video post time since it’s the end of week 1. Look for those all to be posted no later than Sunday. The new video will also be unscripted so I’m a bit more natural. I’ll just have talking points and then I’ll just ramble. Look for it!

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Yesterday was a Yoga X day. I really enjoy yoga because it’s a very calming workout, even though you do alot of movement. It was enjoyable, despite being in a bad mood.

I had to rush the end of it a little because I had to make it to my aerial class. I was still in a bad mood afterwards, so I ended up leaving my aerial class early, but not before I did something really stupid to my toe.

Now, my toe is swollen and it hurts to walk. I’m going to see if I can do today’s workout when I get home, but I’m not sure. I really hope I can, because I’d hate to have to abort again over something so stupid.

As a side note, very soon my program for displaying and saving charts from my heart rate monitor.

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Last night was day 3. I didn’t get a chance to do my workout until 10:00pm last night, which completely screwed up my ability to sleep later on. Also, I ended up skipping Ab Ripper X because I was really tired by the time I was finished with Shoulders and Arms.

Overall, Shoulders and Arms was a good workout. Since I had done shoulders and arms in the p90x lean, I had some numbers/weights to compare it against. While I didn’t increase my reps any (and in some cases lowered the number of reps I did), I increased which bands I used. Last time, I used green (which is medium) for almost all of the exercises, but this time, I found Green to be too light, so I increased to red (medium-hard), and in one instance blue (hard).

I have a feeling I’m going to need to get the next band size up (black) which is the hardest one they make before I’m don’t with p90x.

Today, I’m planning to do YogaX and Ab Ripper X because I go to my aerial practice from 7p-9p today.

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Didn’t get a chance to post yesterday or today because I was really busy. I did do Plyometrics yesterday, and holy crap it was hard. The high-impact nature of it bothers me a little, but I think I’m going to get a really shock-absorbing yoga mat to help out with that, and it’s one of the few workouts that I’m doing with shoes on. Since it has so much jumping, I had to do it in the garage, which isn’t too bad.

I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle posting information to the website. I don’t particularly like posting all the numbers since it takes so much effort to post that. I’m thinking I’ll just talk about improvements during the posts. Maybe I’ll post my spreadsheet. I’ve been research the “power score” thing that one of the blogs I read has for showing progress. I might implement something similar.

Also, for cardio-type days (Plyo, CardioX, yoga, etc), I think I’m going to just post my heart rate information. I didn’t use my HRM yesterday, but I totally should have.

Since my HRM outputs everything as XML, I’m working on a small C# program that reads the XML file and generates the charts for me. Currently, I’m using a python script, but I think I’d rather make it a more robust, ui based system that allows me to save the file out as a PNG or maybe it even uploads the file to my blog?

Anyway, yes. Plyo was great but hard. My knees don’t hurt too much today.

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Yesterday was my first day of p90x classic. After the come down from my show on Saturday, I was really exhausted, but doing the chest and back workout in the morning actually refreshed me and made me free more energetic. Of course, it still wore me out physically, but mentally I had more energy.

It was a good workout with lots of push ups and pull ups. I think I did a decent job, though I don’t have my numbers with me right now (I will post a follow-up post with the numbers). I know that I increased on a few things since the last time I did chest and back (like a month ago) but only by like 1-2 reps.

On Ab Ripper X, which I did in the evening, I increased quite a bit. I think it really helps to split the ab exercises out from the rest because then it allows me to recover my energy levels before actually getting to the ab routine.

While I’m not sore today, I can definitely tell that I’ll be sore tomorrow.

Also, I’m not 100% sure, but I’m probably going to delay day 2 until tomorrow. I forgot to reset my alarm to allow me to do the exercises this morning, and I don’t get home until close to 10 today. But, that’s okay. It just means week 1 is 8 days rather than the morning 7. That’s fine.

Day 0 pictures after the jump (I have measurements too, but again, I don’t have that data with me right now)
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