Friday, January 27, 2006

breakthrough discoveries

[1/25/06 Wednesday]
Swim - 2200m, 41:00
Run - 2.6 miles, 27:41
Abs (300), Hips

It was a great day for workout discoveries today.

1) I think I finally figured out how not to drop my elbow in my freestyle swim stroke. This is something I never really understood how to do before. I realized that I have been bending my arms too much on the catch phase of the stroke. If I keep my arm straighter and reach more as though I am trying to touch the bottom of the pool, I can generate noticeably more power. I have long arms and this allows me to take full advantage of them by pulling more water with each stroke.

2) If I run as part of a bike/run brick, my knee is going to hurt. If I run on days that I don't bike, I will be able to run without pain. I don't know why I was doing all those bricks for the past two weeks. It is not necessary at this point of the year, and it just puts extra stress on my knee.

3) Running slow is better than not running at all. I need to fight the urge to run at an 8 minute pace at all times. Going at a 10 minute pace right now seems to be ok for my knee.

4) My ab routine has been getting stale and too easy lately. The author of a book I have been reading on how to coach swimming says that he has his swimmers do a minimum of 300 sit-ups and 100 push ups each day. I am going to incorporate that strategy into my training, but gradually. Today I started with the 300. I like to do a variety of exercises that work different parts of the abs, so instead of just sit-ups I am going to do 300 reps of any combination of ab exercises. It was a challenge to get to 300, but I made it and felt the burn.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds good, I am most interested in your diet.

    I currently carefully work my diet out into 5 meals with 2 or 3 snacks, a day. About 3,000 cal. on a normal day, 3,500 on a working day. I have been increasing my intake of milk and vegetables, and I stopped the intake of any surplus sugar.

    R2K

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