Day 41 - Relief

I've reached the half way mark!  I'd probably feel a bit better about it if a workout had been involved, but it was just relief today.  Hardly any calories burned, and no sweat produced.

I feel ready for a workout.  Bring it on!

Day 40 - Max Recovery

Recovery week is almost over!  I'm looking forward to getting back into the real workouts on Saturday.

Today's Max recovery went ok.  I had to back off lightly in the high/low planks to stretch out my shoulder, but am otherwise satisfied with the routine.

It's just relief tomorrow (not sure that I need to record that one), and then I'll have reached the half way point. Yay!

Day 39 - Core Cardio and Balance

Day 39 took me back to Insanity's own recovery week, which is something I've not done in a very long time.  The last time I did Insanity, I skipped the recovery week entirely (that's not recommended btw - you need a break before month 2 of Insanity), so although this felt familiar, it also felt somehow alien compared to the other workouts in this Hybrid.

It is a strange beast.  Shaun T makes a point of telling you not to overdo the workout, which at this point is pretty hard.  Unlike the Insanity workout, where month 1 slowly builds before the recovery week, this Hybrid has been oddly paced.  All I wanted to do was hammer through this workout, but I knew that my body needs a bit of a break before things get mad again in a few days.  I slowed things down, kept the same pace as the guys on the DVD, and really took the time to enjoy the workout.  It was still a workout, I still got soaked, and it was still a challenge, but after 40 minutes it was over, and I was happy with my effort and that because of the sorter run time, I had time to sit down and have breakfast before heading into work.

It's Max Recovery tomorrow, followed by two rest days.  I plan to do Relief on at least one of those days, as I feel the need to do some more stretching to prepare for week 7.

Day 38 - Pure Cardio & Cardio Abs

I'd forgotten just how hard you can push in the early Insanity workouts!  Today was only a short one, but it felt great.

Recovery week continues with Core Cardio and Balance tomorrow.

Day 37 - X Trainer & Relief

Today went pretty much as expected.  X Trainer requires a level of coordination that I'll never achieve, so I'm expecting it to look like a mess (timelapse is encoding as I type).  Still, it burned 900 calories, and I got a good stretch in Relief.

Apart from the coordination, there's plenty of room for improvement in X Trainer.  I attempted the push up jumps, but didn't want to overdo it, so that's something.  I failed to complete all the reps in the weights section, and was well and truly out of steam by the end of the workout.  I only get to repeat the workout once more on day 65 (if I make it that far), which is a bit of a shame, as it was fun.

The recovery week is taking me back to Insanity tomorrow for Pure Cario & Cardio Abs.  That should be nice, short and relatively easy, so I'm really going to have to watch my diet.

Day 36 - Cardio Recovery

It's the start of what I'm going to refer to as the recovery week.  It will be longer and heavier than Insanity's week of Core Cardio and Balance, but significantly lighter than the last few weeks.  I'm really going to have to keep an eye on what I eat!

Today's Cardio Recovery went exactly as expected.  I did have a lower calorie burn than on day 33, but that's ok.  Today I just wanted to stretch.

Last week I found that mu body fat had gone up.  That sparked a week of pushing myself harder to not just get that body fat percentage back down, but also to try to figure out what had caused the increase.  As you know from yesterday's analysis, I've determined that it was mostly a combination of poor diet and laziness.  So, how did last week affect my body?

That's a bit better.  Not quite down to Day 22's body fat, but close enough for me.

Tomorrow it's Asylum 2's X-Trainer & Relief.  That should be entertaining to watch, as it requires a lot more coordination than I have.

Day 35 - Rest Day & Week 5 Analysis

What a weird week it has been.  I've had some work related stuff which has seriously affected my sleep, but due to my awesome family, and the challenge I set myself for this week's workouts, I feel pretty good at the moment (Plus we got the new Star Wars Trailer!).

As you hopefully remember from last week's analysis, week 4 was a disaster.  I ate badly, did the lowest intensity week of workouts of the whole year, gained body fat, and injured my left shoulder.  On Saturday, after my normal weigh-in, measurements and workout I challenged myself to turn that around this week.  As this week had the exact same workouts as last week, I wanted to know if I was just being lazy, and whether I could match week 3's calorie burn.

That was a pretty stupid challenge.  When I set it, I had already completed one of this week's workouts, and burning an extra 600 calories in 5 workouts would be really hard.  Especially when two of them (Back and  6 Pack & Cardio Recovery) are not high calorie burners.

So, now for the moment of truth.  Did I do it?  No.

In week 4, I burned 4172 calories.  This week I managed 4686.  That's an increase of 514.  It's short of my target, but I'm not hugely disappointed.  If we compare the last two weeks we can see where I fell short;

I made a reasonable increase in every workout this week except for one - The one I did before setting myself the challenge.  I'm still not convinced that I could have gained those extra 86 calories in Upper elite, but seeing as I managed a 79 calorie increase in Cardio Recovery, I'd have been a lot closer to my goal.

So, now that I've pushed myself harder this week, how does last week's theory that increased fitness = a lower calorie burn look?  Once again, I pulled the data from my Polar H7 Bluetooth 4.0 Heart Rate Sensor and recorded totals for duration and calories burnt.

As this is the last week where we have data for all five workouts, let's see them all together.  Firstly let's look at the duration;

There's no real surprise here - with identical workouts in both weeks 4 and 5 of the workout, there was no difference in time.

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

Now we can see those extra 514 calories!

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

As week 4/5 was very slightly shorter than week 3, the difference in calorie burn per minute really tightens up.  I did 12.2 calories per minute in week three, 10.75 in week 4, and 12.02 this week.

I'll find out tomorrow if pushing harder has made any physical changes.  I'm hoping to have at least lost last week's body fat gain.

So did my increased fitness explain my lower calorie burn per minute last week?  Maybe very slightly, but the main difference was pure laziness.  I simply wasn't pushing as hard as I could.  The next question is whether pushing this hard is sustainable.  Only time will tell.

Next week is looking very light;

In fact, that almost looks like a recovery week!  I certainly won't be setting any personal bests, but I'll push hard all the same.

Thanks for reading!  I hope that this is of interest to somebody out there.  As always, I'll leave you with a little treat for making it through all my waffle.  If you haven't already seen this, sit down, turn up the volume and enjoy.  If you have already seen this, do that anyway :)

Day 34 - Max Cardio Conditioning & Cardio Abs

Had a later than normal workout today, which seemed to help me push a bit harder.  Was it enough to reach my target?  I'll save that for tomorrow.

For now, I'd just like to concentrate on today's workout, and how it compared to the same workout last week;

A 148 calorie difference isn't too bad.  That's more than half of a McDonalds Hamburger!

How did I manage such an amazing feat?  I just tried to hammer through every exercise;

The top graph is last week, and today is below.  I got my heart rate close to 90% in the warmup (represented by the pink bar), and managed to keep it above 80% for the whole of the Max Cardio Conditioning workout.  That then carried through to a higher heart rate during Cardio Abs.

I'm happy with today's effort, and should sleep well tonight.  It's rest day tomorrow, and I'll obviously be doing my normal weekly analysis, as well as revealing whether I met my target calorie burn for the week.

Day 33 - Cardio Recovery

Today was Cardio Recovery.  It's not very exciting, but I did manage to increase my calorie burn slightly compared to last week.

It's Max Cardio Conditioning & Cardio Abs tomorrow.  That will be my last chance to increase this week's calorie burn total.

Day 32 - Vertical Plyo & Relief

I'm not going to match week 3's calorie burn this week.

Here's last Tuesday's Vertical Plyo & Relief;

And here's today's;

I should be thinking that a 124 calorie increase is good, but it needed to be closer to 200 in order for me to make up the difference.  Oh well :(

It's disappointing, but I'll keep pushing and see how close I can get.

Other than that, it was a pretty good workout.  I modified the plyo push-ups to protect my shoulder, but tried to hammer my way through the rest of the workout.

In today's graph (the lower one) you can see that by pushing that bit harder, I was able to keep my heart rate up higher for the latter part of the workout, which then again carried through Relief.

I'm off to watch The Force Awakens trailer for the 10th time this morning :)

Day 31 - Back and Six Pack & Relief

It's Monday morning, it's cold, it's 4AM and I'm getting out of my nice warm bed to do a workout.  Why am I doing this?

Last week, my total calorie burn had dropped significantly, so on Saturday I set my self the challenge of not just beating that calorie burn, but beating it by 600 calories.  The problem with that challenge is that today's and Wednesday's workouts are not high calorie burners, so the difference needs to be made in the remaining workouts.  I set the challenge after Saturday's workout, which left only three to make up that difference.  I've pretty much set myself up to fail.

However, I did manage to burn 54 more calories than I did last week.  Not a huge improvement, but that just leaves 437 additional calories to burn over what I did last week.  Is that possible?  probably not, but I'll push for it anyway.

The back and Six Pack workout went OK.  I think I did better than last week, though the hip flies are still a problem (I'm not yet strong enough to do them with my 10KG weights), and despite much grunting and growling, I didn't complete the final flutter kicks.

I'm actually improving in Relief.  Yesterday I was able to grab my left foot in the hip flexor, and I did the same again today.

It's Vertical Plyo & Relief tomorrow.  Last week it only burned 688 calories, so there is room for improvement.  However, it's also the workout that screwed up my shoulder (which probably accounts for the low calorie burn), so I have to push hard, without damaging myself.  Can I do it?  Tune in tomorrow - same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!

Day 30 - Max Interval Plyo & Relief

Yesterday I set myself a target - Matching week 3's calorie burn.  To do that, I needed an additional 600 calories.  Am I going to do it?  Probably not.

Here's last Sunday's Max Interval Plyo;

And here's today's;

It's better, but it's not going to be enough.  I doubt I can find an extra 100 calories in tomorrow's Back and Six Pack, which means making up the difference in Vertical Plyo and Max Cardio.  Those are going to be tough!

Still, I did push harder, and a 90 calorie improvement is good.  Let's see where I made up the difference;

I pushed hard in the warmup, and as you can see in the lower graph (today) that kept my heart rate slightly higher during the first stretch.  The next three intervals were actually worse than last week, but I got my heart rate back up towards the end of the workout.  This again carried through to the final stretch and even into Relief.

So was last week's calorie drop just down to me being lazy?  Probably, but let's see if I've got the energy to improve on every workout this week, or if I'll hit a wall.

Now it's time for some lunch (roasted chicken thighs) before an afternoon of ironing and watching kid's films :)

Day 29 - Upper Elite & Ab Shredder

Well after last week's low calorie burn, I tried to push a bit harder, and managed to burn 30 more calories.  Meh.

The workout went pretty much as expected.  It's Asylum, so it's bloody hard.  I was pretty much done by the time I got to Ab Shredder, so spent a lot of time stretching out my shoulders rather than doing the exercises.  I also made sure that in the final low plank I didn't put too much strain on my shoulders - It seems to have worked, as nothing aches at the moment.

I did my normal Saturday weigh-in/measure before the workout;

Everything was fine until that bodyfat measurement.  I went through and measured everything again just to be sure.  Same results again - I'm back to day 15's body fat!  Now I could blame this week's lighter calorie burn, but that's not to blame.  Twice this week I ate some pudding, and on one day forgot my lunch, and ended up buying a couple of pork pies and some scotch eggs for lunch instead.  My fault, so I'm going to have to push extra hard now to get back on track.  If I eat right, and try to match week 3's calorie burn, theoretically I should get back to day 22's percentage.  That's my target for this week.

It's Max Interval Plyo & Relief tomorrow.  Last time it burned 879 calories, so I need to try to push for ~1000 if I'm going to burn the extra 600 calories I need this week.

Day 28 - Rest Day & Week 4 Analysis

Well that was an interesting week.  It's probably the first time that this felt like a hybrid of Asylum and Insanity.  There was definitely a bias towards Insanity, but the two Asylum workouts stepped things up, kicked my butt, and almost pushed me too far.

I don't blame the workout for my aches and injuries.  It's a DVD.  Nobody is holding a gun to my head and telling me to push myself harder than I should.  Shaun T constantly says to "know your limits" and "stay within your skill level".  I didn't.  Whether it's because I was conscious that my efforts would be published on Youtube, or, as I keep telling my daughters, boys do stupid things just because they are boys, or some combination of those two factors, I did decide to go for it, and ended up with some shoulder/back pain and a couple of disrupted nights sleep.  Hopefully that's my lesson learned, and I'll be more careful next time.

Week 4 felt like a step up from last week (more on that later), but how did it compare to the standalone workouts?  Once again, I pulled the data from my Polar H7 Bluetooth 4.0 Heart Rate Sensor and recorded totals for duration and calories burnt.

Firstly, lets look at the total duration of week 4 of each of the four workouts;

The hybrid is still taking well over six hours per week.  I'm getting used to it, but if you're short on time, then the standalones are probably a better option.

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

What happened?  The hybrid was 99 minutes longer than Insanity, but only burned 129 more calories!  I know there was a lot more stretching, but that's not what I'm used to seeing.

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

10.75 calories per minute!  That's now the lowest intensity workout week I've had out of all four workouts this year!  How much of that was down to the workouts, and how much of it was down to me overdoing it is unclear for now.  Next week I get to do the exact same workout schedule again, so I'll wait until next Friday to draw any real conclusions.

Next week will technically be the last week where I can compare the same week in all four workouts.  Both Asylum and Asylum 2 are only 30 day programmes.  What happens after that?  Do the graphs just stop?  I'll probably start comparing each hybrid week to an average Asylum/Asylum2 week (they're all pretty close in intensity),  and see if that looks ok.

Now that I'm a third of the way through the hybrid, how have the last four weeks looked?

Length wise, the last three weeks have been pretty consistent.  Long, but consistent.

Calorie wise, at the moment there seems to be a downward trend.  From a brief Google search into calories burned during long distance running, it seems that two people running the same fixed distance should burn roughly the same number of calories, even if one takes longer than the other.  The key difference between the two people in this scenario is fitness.  A fitter person can cover the race distance in a lot less time, but the calorie burn remains the same.

If we apply that logic here, and assume that I'm getting fitter each week, then if the duration is fixed (which it pretty much is), my calorie burn should decrease each week.  It's an interesting idea, but I'm just one person, with one set of data, so maybe the workouts are just taking their toll on me, and that's why my calorie burn is dropping.

 

But wait!  I do have more data!  I have the other four workouts;

 

To test the hypothesis, we need a workout with a fairly consistent duration.  Asylum 2 looks pretty good.

It's not as extreme, but there is a similar pattern in Asylum 2 as in the Hybrid.  Again, it's too small a data set to draw any conclusions, but it does give me some hope that rather than a sign that either the workout is getting easier, or my body is failing, that instead I'm getting measurably fitter?  That sounds like a positive way to look at the graphs, so I'm going to delude myself with that for now.

I do have another reason to be positive.  Perhaps it was just good lighting, but this morning not only could I see my bottom two ribs on each side, but there was a hint of some upper abs.  There's definitely not enough to post any photos yet, but it's a sign of progress, and hopefully means that in 56 days time I'll have some of those before & after pictures that people like to show in random ads next to exercise equipment.

Again, thanks for reading.  I hope someone finds this interesting.  If you do, please post a comment below, or even better, share it with someone else.

As always, as a reward for making it through all those graphs, here's a random Youtube video.  It made me chuckle;

Day 27 - Max Cardio Conditioning & Cardio Abs

Day 27.  I've been at this for almost a month!

Today's workout went pretty much as expected.  I'm still enjoying the relative ease of the Insanity workouts, and at only 45 minutes, Max Cardio Conditioning even felt a bit too short.  Cardio Abs still hurt, but it's supposed to, and my core is feeling stronger.

It's rest day tomorrow, and then week 5 is a repeat of week 4.  I'll just have to take it a bit easier in Vertical Plyo so that I don't screw up my shoulder again.