Monday, March 24, 2008

Monday gym

A very good one with M. These Monday sessions have the most unfailingly positive effect on my mood--it is strange, I do not have much of an impulse to make it to the gym on my own, but I very much like all the stuff I do there, and of course it makes it all very pleasant and easy having somebody concentrating so hard on getting you to do stuff. I guess it's just that it doesn't really have a hold on my imagination--triathlon training is another story!

A lot of good regular stuff (planks, pushups, a good V-raise variant, the usual kind of combinations of upper- and lower-body exercises), plus one quite evil new one I had not done before. You stand on one leg, holding a medicine ball in both hands, then lean forward (chest up) as you extend the other leg behind you.

(JMD: "A yoga-type lady would have her leg really straight and horizontal to the ground." M.: "Yep.")

Then you raise and lower the ball, then return to a standing position but without touching the foot to the ground. We were doing 2 x only through most of the stuff today, but I had to plead for a third round of these ones, they were so delightfully evil.

(M.: "I never heard that one before!")

2 comments:

Laura said...

So your chest is straight up and down and makes a straight line with your standing leg, like a ballet arabesque? Or it's parallel to the floor so it makes a straight line with your extended leg, like a yoga T-balance pose? And I'm assuming this works your core, right?

I will have to try this one.

Jenny Davidson said...

Parallel to the floor, yoga T-balance--chest is only "up" in the sense that you want that feeling of slightly pulling your shoulder-blades together. It's good for core stuff, you really feel it on your sides, but it's also an excellent balance exercise and you're working your lower body too...