“Winning isn’t always finishing first. Sometimes winning is just finishing.” ~ Manuel Diotte
Please accept my apologies for going almost a whole week before posting again. I’m usually better about that, but our evenings were pretty full last week and I didn’t have the time to train and write, so the writing went by the wayside.
Last week we finished our “medium” and “heavy” days with five ladders of four and five ladders of five, respectively, on March 4th and 6th.
For our “medium” day endurance work, we did fifty rep sets of swings, with twenty seconds of rest for eight minutes, totaling 200 reps.
For our “heavy” day, Val used her AOS 12 kg while I used my AOS 24 kg. When you do your first 5 ladder / 5 rung workout there’s really no way to prepare for it other than the progressive build-up we’ve been doing for the past eight weeks. Once you’re in it, you either finish or you don’t. We did. And strongly too, I might add. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll feel those last few rungs and you should be pushing with laser-like focus when you do those reps to prevent injury. But it was very satisfying to complete all our reps as we had planned.
Our “heavy” day endurance work was short and involved twenty-five rep sets of swings with five seconds of rest for three minutes. We got 100 reps in a few seconds over three minutes. That was brutal.
Once we finished, I looked forward in the AOS ETK workbook and saw four more weeks of the same thing. I know the program volume is designed to raise one’s strength level to one significantly higher than where we started from, but completing the 5 ladders of 5 rungs was enough for both my wife and I and neither one of us was looking forward to 4 more weeks of the same clean and press ladders (Sorry Pavel and Anthony). We’re were starting to get a bit bored so we’ll switch into something else.
In fact, when I last asked for ideas for our next program, my friend Bob Garon, from Synergy Kettlebell Training, suggested I give Girevoy Sport (GS) training another go. While I’m still not convinced GS is my thing, I might have tried to do too much too soon (who me?) before, which might have had a bit of an influence on my decision to switch back to Hardstyle.
At any rate, I’ve decided to take a few days of rest and then split the difference between Hardstyle and GS and do two days a week of the Art of Strength Resolution program, and two to three days of GS work.
Specifically, I’m going to try to earn either a Rank III in the World Kettlebell Club system for the biathlon, or a Rank IV in the IKFF system. I’ll write a little more about how I’m going to accomplish that tomorrow and what those numbers look like. It’s 10:30 now and time for bed.
Ciao.
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