Sunday Finisher 20 x 30 in 20!

I love my Sunday morning workouts!  Sunday is pretty much just for me because I do everything I want to, as long as I want to, and if I'm really lucky a few of my students join me!  The workout is broken up into three 45 minute sessions starting at 7:15am.

The first is focused on heavy presses after a quick warm up, and usually finishes with a much faster paced "I go, you go" swing / clean / squat / press complexes that may or may not be done with double bells.  This workout has the deliberate goal of increasing press strength which is why it's done first.

The second is GS practice.  If there is a competition date on the horizon the sets are programed accordingly, which hasn't been the case of late, so the practice focuses more on maintaining base levels of grip strength and cardio endurance.

The third is a ballistic wild card, and the last chance for me to put the nail in the swing coffin!  Which is why I've started to use the concept of a workout "finisher".  Just swings, or Max Vo2 snatches, a variation of high volume snatch / swing combinations.  If I include squats, it's not for strength so they're mostly done with lighter weights and higher reps, with the focus more about increasing and maintaining hip/glute flexibility.

But to be honest, if and when I have to do this last workout by myself, which is rare but more often lately, it could be a good thing and a not so good thing!  My long time student/training partner Meg is a tough cookie!  She's capable of crazy amounts of work, hard work, and game for anything I could come up with.  A lot of times if I want to "test" how difficult something is, like the Strength Matters Swing Test, I'll have her join me in trying it out because if she thinks it's challenging then I trust it is!  In fact, she did the very first trail run of the SMST with me, 200 24kg one hand swings (10 x 20) in 10 minutes!  And neither one of us would be required to use the 24kg based on body weight, so that goes to show you how powerful regular and consistent high volume swing practice can be!

Recently I've been "testing" more variations of heavy swings, for reps and time.  Yesterday, on my own, when it came down to my last 30 minutes of the morning's training I knew 600 swings was going to be the minimum amount of work left to complete.  I had done plenty of squats earlier in the week, and I want to snatch on Tuesday...that left only swings (lol, "only"!)  Well, being alone, and without the energy of at least one other person, and already almost 2 hours of training completed, I could barely get excited about another 30 full minutes of swings!  So I decided to stay with the 600 reps, but get them done as quickly as possible.

I knew I wanted to do some 24kg one hand swings, but not kill myself, because it had been a while since I last did them.  I knew I didn't want to do all 600 swings with the 24kg because Thursday mornings are my heavy double swing training and there's just no need to do that much heavy training in the same week.  100 wasn't enough, 600 way too many, so I settled on 200 reps, 1/3 of the total.  It made sense to break up the total into thirds, heavy, moderately heavy and moderate weights since the goal was to complete them in less time, much less time, than "equal work to rest", which would have taken 30 minutes.

I wanted to do one hand swings for half of my 24kg 200 reps, and two hand swings for the other 100 reps and so I decided to do that with all three weights.  I also know that most times, for me,  the longer the set is in continuous reps the "easier" it feels (the more times I put the bell down = the more I haev to pick it up again!), so I would limit the number of reps in each set to only 20, and the rest period would not be timed, instead, random.  In my head I was hoping to finish around 20 minutes....it took me 22 min 40 seconds.  But this turned out to be a good thing because now I know I could have done it, if I would have paid attention, and this first result was me not pushing myself too hard.  So you know what that means, don't you?  Yep, I gotta do it again in 20 minutes or less (probably not less!).  So I'll wait a few weeks and repeat it with this new goal in mind.  And then....I'll try it in reverse!  Starting with the lightest bell, the 16kg, and ending with the heaviest, the 24kg!  I love testing out how simply changing an up hill ladder to a downhill ladder and visa versa can drastically change the effect of ease or difficulty of a target challenge.

Guidelines of this week's Sunday Finisher; goal of 600 swing reps under 30 minutes

3 bells, heavy, moderately heavy, moderate.
one hand swings for half of the swing reps
max of 20 reps per set, no minimum (you can do sets of 10 if you choose)
rest only as long as you need to between each set. 

I chose to alternate my one hand swings sets using 5 R/ 5 L x 2 and 10 R/10 L because this made it easier to keep track of the 5 sets of 20, and I simply didn't feel ready to do my first set w/24kg 10 reps at a time, I wanted to ease into it.....see, I told you I was a weenie when I trained on my own!  lol

Looking at the video I know I could have shaved off a lot of the rest time I took between sets, in fact afterward I was able to calculate in order to get it done in 20 minutes I can only allow 10 seconds, or less to rest between sets.  But it's all good and fine because now I have a goal based on how difficult this trial test was, and I have more to look forward to in the next couple of months :)  Hmm...I should give this one a name since I'm going to do it again....20 x 30 in 20 :)