World's Toughest Mudder and Goruck Training - Day 18

Monday, October 17, 2011

Today I got ahold of the Convict Conditioning 2 ebook and couldn't wait to incorporate the exercises and information into my routine. My workout was as follows.

Calf raises
3x15 straight leg each leg
4x100 bent leg double raises
supersetted with 7x5 pistols to chair with eyes closed ea leg

15 fingertip wall pushups
2x5 tabletop fingertip pushups

bouldering v0-v3

4x1 min bar hang with 1 min rest in between sets

Sometimes when I get excited about things I jump into things right away. This was the case with calf raises. In college I used to do 3x50 bent single leg calf raises morning and night. This helped me to get ready for my summer job hiking all over the mountains as a wildland firefighter and contributed to increasing my vertical jump. So I figured I'd jump right to the straight leg singles. After reading a bit further in between sets, the book said to stay with a step as long as it was still giving a benefit. I switched over to double bent leg raises and found they were indeed a bit tougher than expected. I'll stick with these as long as they give a good burn.

Since the Z-Health Essentials of Elite Performance course, I've been incorporating more movements into my routine with my eyes closed. Moving in this fashion forces my stabilizer muscles, proprioception and sense of balance to work all that much harder. World's Toughest Mudder is a 24 hour event. In addition to the "normal" physical demands of this event, sleep deprivation and the dark night time conditions will play a factor. Therefore, I plan to work my balance, vision and proprioception in an effort to hep counteract this.

For a while now I've been climbing to work my grip strength and ability to scale whatever obstacles they might throw at us. So of course I fell in love with the chapter on grip strength. This chapter broke grip training down into a astonishingly simple progression. It mentioned that climbers have some of the best grip strength around from working their grip while hanging. From climbing I'm used to hanging off of grips much more difficult than pull up bars. Still though, the last 5 seconds of each hang had my forearms quivering.