Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Humbled by the Knee Pushup

Monday was the third day of my 72 hours at work and was fairly easy as far as workouts go, but still surprisingly difficult.

For as long as I've been coaching, I've prohibited my volleyball kids from doing knee pushups. The kids learn very quickly to never call them girl pushups in my presence. So you can imagine I wasn't to thrilled about starting step three of the Convict Conditioning pushup. Still, I want to be as fair to the program as possible in determining it's efficacy.

I performed the following reps

Knee Pushups 3x30

Bent Knee raises 3x30


Keeping my elbows tucked in tight to my ribcage worked my tris, lats and delts more than the standard wide pushup. In fact, my tris were decently sore the next day.

For the bent knee raises I again focussed on keeping the small of my back pressed into the floor to maintain the hollow position and further work my abs.

Later that day I got in a little bit more of a workout carrying a sick patient down a narrow flight of stairs. My crew member and I performed a "sit pick" where I wrapped my arms around the patient's torso and my crew member grabbed the patient's legs. The best thing here was the patient waited until the bottom of the stairs to puke, only getting a little bit on my gloved hand.

August 22, 2010 - Post Fire Mini Tri

We spent about 5 hours at the fire. Once we got back to the station I figured might as well just go ahead and get my workout in then since I was already all sweaty. I performed three exercises back to back for 15 minutes each to simulate a mini triathlon.

First up 1 arm swings
16 kg bell
Viking Warrior 15:15

Exercise Bike
15 minutes, random hill program, level 11, 15:15 interval
total distance 4.88 miles
average speed 19.2

Stair climb
15 min, 15:15, interval program, level 13

I'm glad I hopped in the weight room when I did, because it would've been a lot harder to muster the motivation if I had let myself sit down for a bit once we got back. The machines aren't the greatest, but are the closest I can get to sport specificity for tris and stair climbs while at work.