ASA Workout kicking arse

Today was the first ASA in a while for me. I missed Monday's workout because of my Monday migraines. I'll tell you what: migraines suck.

Started with the ladders. We pretty much do our own ladders now, with the standard set of them. I know that G has a few more ladder exercises up his sleeves (note to self: get one or two next workout).

Today was a legs workout to complement Kris' Monday killer upper body workout. We started off with figure 8 runs. We ran around a hula-hoop, then around a ring of cones, in a effort to move the arms quickly to lead the feet into moving quickly. We did 4 of these: 2 clockwise and 2 counterclockwise. The trick of these is to move the arms fast. The feet will move arms are moving fast.

Next we had one legged squats. Using a squat machine that held a weight bar in a vertical track, with locking hooks that stop the bar from dropping, we balanced on one foot and put the back foot on a bench behind us. Placement of the front foot was important, as the front knee wasn't supposed to go over the foot. Dropping into a squat straight was also important to maximize effort on the glute, and not the hamstring.

We did 10 squats per leg, doing both legs. My first set was with the bar only, the second with 10# each side, the third with 5# each side. Three sets of both legs.

Alternating with the three sets of single leg squats was jumping onto boxes. The first set we jumped to high boxes (for Kris that means 3 boxes, for me that was 2), landing both feet, count of 10. The second set was 4 landing both feet, 4 landing right foot, 4 landing left foot; but on a lower box. In my case it was about 4" lower: a 12" box with two step risers on top.

Next we had diagonal hops/bounds. G placed a series of cones about 3-4' apart, offset about 45°. We hopped from one cone to the next, landing on the right foot at the end cone. At the end cone, we paused, sank a bit to hold the position, then exploded forward into a sprint. We did about 3 landing on our right foot. G removed one cone and we did another 3 ending on our left foot, pausing before a sprint.

Out and back sprints were next. Three cones were placed at 8m intervals. Starting at the middle cone, we sprinted to an end cone, turned and sprinted to the other far cone, then turned and sprinted back to the middle cone. We did 8 of these, each time trying to beat our initial sprint time. My first time was 6.47, my fastest (which was incidently my 10th sprint) was 6.18. The competition between the two of us was who could reduce his time each time. Whoever had the least number of time reductions had the bonus of an extra 2 minutes of abs at the end.

Kris lost.

I did an extra couple sprints because we were working on explosiveness (and discussing my lack of). I make the mistake of not exploding, or exploding the wrong direction (pulling in instead of exploding out, for example). I think I'll be practicing in front of the mirror.

Balanced "around the world" hamstring bends was next. With a 10# weight, balancing on your left foot, bend over and touch the ground in front of you, stand up, touch the ground 45° to the left, stand back up, touch the ground 90° to the left, stand up, touch the groun 45° behind you to the left, stand up. Then reverse it, touching the ground and standing up four times. Repeat with the right foot, touching to the right. That's one set. We did three sets. My lower back hurt!

Last was abs. Let me say here: I suck at abs now. My abs are so weak compared to a few months ago! The usual: V ups, bicycles, crunches, catch the ball over the head and throw back (this time on an incline), lower back lifts (with weighted ball!). Yes, once again, my abs sucked.