‘Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate. The world wasn’t formed in a day, and neither were we. Set small goals and build upon them’ – Lee Haney
A few weeks ago I wrote about how we’ve started the Insanity training programme and how we were getting along with it. I’m half proud, half pleased to say, we managed a total of 2 weeks.
As a recap, for anyone unfamiliar, the idea is to follow the training programme, doing various different workouts throughout the week, with one day off, then do a fitness test every 2 weeks to see how you’ve improved.
Us making it to the second fitness test, and deciding to sack it off has nothing to do with the fact that we found it too tough, although, it is VERY tough. The reasons behind us deciding to stop are more to do with the flawed programme rather than lack of motivation or drive.
- The programme is so unbelievably repetitive it becomes boring. In the beginning you are on a cycle of only 3 or 4 work outs, and the warm up is identical in each of them, so after a week or so, you want to punch stupid Shaun T in his stupid enthusiastic face every time he tells you to dig deep
- We did the second fit test and both of us performed worse second time round than first time. Now, my personal theory behind this is that, first time round, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and probably had extremely bad form, therefore were probably, in effect, cheating and had no genuine results to go off. So come the second fit test, where we probably had better form, our results were worse: very demoralising.
- The meal plans are impossible to stick to if you want anything that resembles a normal social life, I’m sorry but I like to go out for dinner, and have a glass (ahem bottle) or two of wine at the weekend.
- The schedule is relentless, with only one day off a week (see above about social life)
- We’ve had a pretty decent summer in the UK for a change, so it seems a shame to be staying in the house in front of the TV doing a work out, when you could be outside exercising, getting some fresh air.
Do that’s it, Insanity done, tried it, didn’t like it, not doing it again.
So what now? Now we’re going back to basics, putting one foot in front of the other, and starting to run. My husband has always been a runner, even venturing into ultra-marathon territory sometimes, where as I have always been of the mind-set that you should only run if you’re being chased.
One thing that Insanity has taught me is that if you haven’t got the right form, what’s the point, you could be doing more harm than good. But with running, unless you go over on an ankle, or do it in stilettos, it’s something that’s pretty hard to get wrong. So two weeks ago I charged up the generic music player, downloaded Run Keeper and went for it. I’ll admit, the first couple of times, I hated it, it made everything hurt and I felt I couldn’t catch my breath properly at all. But the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve started to enjoy. Last week I even did my first 5K, which is the furthest I’ve ever ran without stopping.
My mum always said there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes, so unless it’s super icy or 3 foot deep in snow, I plan on keeping it up over the winter (we have a decent treadmill in the house if worse comes to the worse) and have signed up to do our Local Free Parkruns every Saturday morning.
It’s baby steps at the moment, My times for running a 5K are atrocious but at least it’s something I can build on over time, we’ll see how this foray into my never ending battle to lose weight goes!
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