The only ones who die...

...are the ones who jump off the rollercoaster.

So I had a back injury and the doc gave me some badass 'roids. Good stuff for sure. Yet the pain meds and anti-spasmotic damn near put me into anaphalactic shock! I told him I didn't need pain meds, but he insisted. I took one of each of the deadly three as prescribed and within two hours I thought I was a goner for sure. I stood at the door of my house at 230 am with my phone in hand. I predialed 911 with my finger over the call button. I hoped they would see me laying there in my driveway. Whatever the meds did, I nearly passed out and croaked. I stayed up late mostly to make sure my cardiac system was still pumping juice to my guts. I lived. I'm dumping those meds, I don't need them. My back feels much better now.

I decided to jump slowly back into some grappling and tried Tuesday's Sambo class. It's a hell of a lot of fun and a great standup game... Lesson learned (again), if one get's paired with a noob, put on every bit of Medieval Armour one can buy. For light sparring; I grab him, he grabs me and immediately knees me straight in the nose. Not necessarily for any apparent reason either. That sucked...so as we progressed in our light grip fighting match, I throw him with today's Russian tie up throw. A quasi sitting your ass, o-ouchi gari thing. He went over and then DOWN onto my now newly sprained ankle. Thanks noob.


So yesterday's workout did not involve running toward or from anything on fire or rabid. This time we focused on arms and core exercises. I decided we should attempt some sort of rapid movements, interlaced with static positions and see if one of us bleeds internally.

Here's what we did:
10 minutes total, each exercise was given 30 seconds.
Motion exercises are at 100% speed.
Static exercises are at 0% speed ;)

Pullups
Plank

Pushups
Pullup static hangs (eyes above bar)

Bicycle kick situp thing holding a 25lb plate OFF the mat behind your head like a hard pillow.
Crab plank (like a bridge but body is flat like a table and arms are next to you, not over your head)

Punch the shit out of the heavy bag
Hold a pushup at 1/2 mast

Leglift situp (Straight leg lift, then pump your ass up off the mat to touch the ceiling with your toes)
20 LB each hand static upright row hold

THEN IMMEDIATELY REPEAT THE ABOVE MESS FOR A TOTAL OF 10 MINUTES


So yeah, it sucks.
I wore my Garmin of course and saw some fascinating trends with this workout.

Pullups, pushups, pullup holds, hitting the bag, upright row holds always increased heartrate.
Plank, bicycle situps, crap plank, 1/2 pushup, leglift situp always decreased heartate.

So now we can apply some statistics:
The biggest increase was from rest to the end of the pushups: 62 bpm
The biggest increase not from the beginning was from hitting the bag(1st round) at: 38 bpm
The smallest increase was the 2nd round of pullups at: 5.9 bpm

The biggest decrease was the plank on the 1st round at: 37.9 bpm
The smallest decrease was the 1st round of leglift situps at: 3.6 bpm


Here's the graph of the data. The workout starts at the 1 minute mark, ending at the 11 minute mark. You can just barely see the tiny, itty-bitty psychsomatic lump trying to appear at the 0:35 second mark.

Interestingly, my final recovery time was long and slow. Much like a long, low intensity cardio workout. I was also able to gain the benefit of quick, high intensity recoveries during most of the static positions. I guess that is a win-win in terms of multimodal, functional exercise. This workout is much like being attacked by mutant Cromagnons. There you are, sleeping...then BAM a war club rushes in and wrecks your cave-wife's new clay pot. You're now pissed and grab your stone axe and beat some brains in. Sometimes you are bashing away, and sometimes you are locked in a static hold while wrestling a weapon away. The abrupt end comes when you kill off the last mutant and clean up the mess. The previous workout was the exact opposite; a long, snowy hike to the enemy homeland for a fight with a rival clan over Net-Neutrality...

My goal with this is to rearrange the exercises to see if I can maximize the effect. What happens if I mix the dynamic with the static exercises so that there is absolute maximum BPM deltas? I believe this would increase the quality of the work out considerably!

Later!
Mark
p.s. sorry no pics. This workout was more of a study to see if anyone would spontaneously implode like a blackhole into a highly compressed singularity of dark matter. Then rapidly detonate, splattering my expensive camera with chunky human salsa.