Day 21 - Rest Day & Week 3 Analysis

It's that time of the week where I look back at the previous six days worth of workouts, and see how the whole of week 3 compared to the standalone workouts.

After last week's craziness, this week felt a lot lighter.  Four of the six workouts came from Insanity, and the remaining two were the same strength workout from Asylum 1.

I enjoyed the cardio in the Insanity workouts, but what I loved was the strength workouts.  And all because of one exercise - The Pyramid Row Progression;

That may only be 8 extra push ups, but those two workouts are only 72 hours apart!  I'm fairly pleased with that minor achievement.

Now on to the real reason you're reading this - Graphs!!!!!  Again, I've grabbed the data from my Polar heart rate monitor and have recorded totals for duration and calories burnt.

Firstly, lets look at the total duration of week 3 of each of the four workouts;

Clocking in at just over 6.5 hours, the hybrid lasted more than an hour longer than any of the standalones.  What does confuse me is that this week's hybrid was only 19 minutes shorter than last week.  It felt a lot shorter!

Now we look at the calorie burn for each of the programmes;

With over 4800 calories burned, the hybrid beats all the standalones by almost 1000 calories.  But is 600 calories less than last week.  A 600 calorie drop in 19 minutes is pretty big.  No wonder it felt lighter.

Now if we combine the two graphs to look at the calorie burn per minute;

The two rounds of strength definitely reduced my calorie burn, plus the four rounds of relief knocked me down to just 12.2 calories per minute.  That's a whole calorie per minute down from last week.

So how to sum up week 3?  As I said in previous posts, I had a feeling that week 3 was supposed to let me recover from week 2.  It was by no means a recovery week, and burning 4800 calories wasn't easy, but I feel like I'm ready to step up a gear in week 4.

Thanks for reading.  Please feel free to comment on any of my posts or videos.  For now I'll leave you with something inspiring.  Todd over at NCFitClub.com has been doing these workouts since 2008, and this is his journey;