CC Day 15 and Z-Health

Last Friday I completed the following reps

Vertical Pulls 3x15 performed on my dining room table

Full Squats 2x30


I seem to have plateaued on the vertical pulls. I'm almost 4 months into this program and not progressing week to week on the vertical pulls like I am on the other exercises. Even though the program states GTG (Grease the Groove from Pavel's Naked Warrior) is good only for initially working the first 1 or 2 reps of an exercise, I've had a lot of success getting into the higher reps. When I was going through the paramedic program, we had 8 hours of classroom time 5 days a week. As firefighters who are used to getting up and moving around all day, sitting in the same spot for that long is quite a shock to the system. We'd get a 5 or 10 minute break roughly every hour or so. I began doing 25 push ups every break. Each week I'd add on another 5 pushups to each set. By the end of our schooling, I was cranking out 55 push ups every hour with ease. I never did test my max at that time, but when I started the program it was 50 push ups. Different methods work for different people.


Friday was a lighter workout day than I had originally planned, but still accomplished quite a bit. I went through the Z-Health neural warm-up, balance drills and vision drills. I worked the vision drills particularly intensively to get ready for Sevens tournament the next day. All the drills were tested for 1 minute at a time. First up was the saccadic eye movement drill to test how well my eyes were able to track from side to side. I was able to track back and forth 71 times the first time and 78 the second. Ideally I'd like to get this over 150.

Near/Far focusing with first the right side and the left resulted in scores of 52/48 and 52/51. This is the toughest one for me, but at the same time, it's the one that seems to yield the biggest results as far as visual acuity and an overall sense of relaxation.

Hand/eye and Hand foot coordination are the easiest for me, because they feel like sports. For the hand/eye coordination I practiced passing motions to either side. The results were 88 the first time and 102 the second time. The second time I had a better grasp of the movement language used for this drill. For the hand/foot coordination I held the ball in both hands in front of me and practiced my footwork and sidestepping. The results were 87 and 87.

Looking back, I think these drills had a pretty big impact on my mental state and readiness for the games, as well as my agility and gameplay.