Body And Fitness Blog

Saturday - cardio and abs

Run

Just a quick 25 minutes on the treadmill today, bit of interval training but wasn’t breathing very well. I seem to have developed some severe synus problem which inhibits my breathing through my nose, as such I’m under-performing when doing cardio work as I’m not able to get enough oxygen into my lungs. Must go and see a doctor about my nose…

Despite my rubbish breathing, I managed to do a 25 minute run, with a small amount of interval training in the middle:

• 3 minutes at 9 kmh
• 7 minutes at 10 kmh
• 2 minutes at 13 kmh
• 2 minutes at 11.5 kmh
• 4 minutes at 10 kmh
• 1 minute at 14 kmh
• 1 minute at 12 kmh
• 5 minutes at 10 kmh

Abs

I don’t like doing too much work on the abs, I’m not obsessed with having a six pack at the moment, more concerned with ensuring I’ve got a good core and that it gets toned up, so that when I do eventually shed my winter fat, I will look decent.

• Plank for 60 seconds, two sets
• Crunch machine, 65kg for 2 sets of 30 reps
• Bench leg raises, two sets of 12 reps

That was it for my workout, fairly quick and painless, just what you want on a Saturday morning, don’t want it interferring with your day too much!

I listened to Metallica Death Magnetic again down the gym, and I think I may have mentioned this before, but I once read that listening to music you like, has been shown to improve your performance. Well, I certainly can vouch for that today.

I was halfway through my run, having already done my first hard interval, settling into a four minute recovery before the last harder interval, when my favourite song from the album came on - All Nightmare Long.  It’s an awesome tune and it really lifted me halfway through my run. Listening to that tune made it easier to get to the end, knowing that I had something like seven minutes of good, hard pumping music to get me through.