Cross Training

Is running 5 days a week enough? By some measures yes, but I want to add some form of strength training to my routine. In fact, I want to employ a comprehensive body weight training set so that I can get maximum gains in the shortest amount of time. I think that being fit enough to throw ones own body around is a sign of good fitness and that is what I am striving for.

One day, I'm surfing around the internet and come across this fitness guy named Ross (www.rossboxing.com) who has a great site that is devoted to boxing workouts. Now in my opinion, boxers and wrestlers have a tremendous training rountine. Those guys are in shape! Well, on Ross's website he mentions this toal body conditioning exercise called a Burpee (http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/rossboxing2.htm) which is a variation on the famed squat thrust. He advocates a circuit that is a 2 minute round broken up in 30 second intervals of burpee then shadow boxing with a one minute rest between rounds. I tried this today. I will be starting with 1 minute rounds. I was lucky to make it through. I'm also adding some other exercises to make about a 30 minute routine that is high intensity and will really challenge me to dig down and find the fitness.

I'm planning on 3 workouts per week and it's looking like Mon, Wed Fri are my days. I have put together a 6 week routine which modestly progresses from where I am today with 10% load increases each week. I'll reassess at the end of 6 weeks to see how I can shake this up.

Tomorrow is a running day. I did get some new shoes. I wore them today to break them in. Tomorrow I'll do a couple a miles in the new kicks. I'll write more tomorrow.