NYE 20:16 Round #2, Swings, and Tuesday endurance workout 1-2-3

Gosh, it seems as if this was forever ago!  Probably because I took a little trip last week to see my bestie Fawn in St Paul and then off to Milwaukee to snowshoe with Diana (and The Fonz!).  It's become an annual January snow trip, losing a little momentum, but now I'm back to the routine that I love! First things first, I need to finish up journaling my New Years Eve 20:16 results.


Strategy.  First of all my normal workouts are at least 1 hour long, so this is the reason I chose to do 3 twenty minute rounds instead of two.  Maribel, who trains with me on Thursday mornings also chose three rounds, whereas Matt, who trains with me on Saturdays chose two rounds because his workout is normally 45 minutes long, so each of us chose an appropriate length of time.  None of us trained specifically for this test, which was part of the point, instead we were able to see where our strength and endurance would fall given our current conditioning.


Last blog post I journaled about my first round, snatches.  I chose that one first as it was the most important to me, swings next because I wanted the first two rounds to focus on the ballistics, finally slowing down and measuring what kind of strength and endurance I would have at the end with squats, a relatively new skill I've added in the last 1 1/2 years, training more regularly, but again, a ton of room for improvement.


I deleted my swing round from my iPad before posting it, but you can see the first part of it at the end

of my snatch video.  I decided just that morning that I would do only two hand swings, and NO one hand swings, for 2 reasons; I had previously accomplished 1000 continuous one hand swings w/16kg swings, and because the point of this challenge is not continuous "unbroken" sets, it would be impossible to do with two hand swings anyway!  There is no way, until someone proves me wrong, that anybody could do 20 minutes of continuous two hand swings, with the appropriate weight, without it going extremely ugly after the first 200-300 reps (5-7 1/2 minutes), and that's extremely subjective :)  Personally I'm good for about 200, then it's all over!


So you can imagine my surprise when I only got to 20 reps in my first set before I had to put the bell down!  20 reps!  20 reps!  Shocking! Shocking at first, because I think so darn highly of myself apparently!  But not so much after taking into account I had just completed 370 16kg snatches in 20 minutes...duh!  In fact, after that first set of 20 swing reps bitch slapped me it became clear that sets of 20 would be the order of the day! I abandoned any other strategy I thought I had, even if I could increase the length of the reps/sets it would be much easier to keep track and measure improvement by sticking to sets of 20, not tracking rest periods, just starting each set as I felt appropriately recovered from the last.


It took the better part of that 20 minute round, maybe about 12 minutes, before I felt I could do longer sets, say up to 1 minute/40 reps sets.  BUT that was not the point, BUT it was a relief!  It was a relief to finally feel like I hadn't been beaten down with a stick and my recovery between sets was faster.  I recorded 22 sets of 20 reps, and one last set of 16, for a total of 456 two hand swing reps.  20 minutes of "equal work to rest" swings is approximately 400 reps, so to complete almost 60 more reps means that I averaged just under 23 reps per minute....again, tons of room for improvement!


I'm actually surprised by this because it seemed as if I was working at a 2 to 1 ratio, 2 parts work to one part rest (30 sec work, 15 sec rest), but since I don't have the video showing the exact number of reps and sets I have to rely on what I scribbled down on the chalk board :)  It's not my goal to improve this number too much as my main goal is to improve my snatch round while maintaining my swings and squats for the next challenge!  (I just did the math, and if I'm correct I actually wasn't too far off!  20 minute of 30/15 = 466 reps, so 10 reps short, whew!)


Speaking of swings....

Last week I missed a Saturday workout and a Tuesday workout. Although I got a few swings/snatches in on Monday, it's rarely ever close to the regular workouts I get at home and on a schedule.  I got back home late Tuesday night and Thursday mornings are my regular workouts so although tempted as I may have been to pick up a bell the next day I needed to get back to my yoga practice as well.  Wednesday was a yoga day and I picked up almost where I left off on Thursday.  It's really my sport training that suffers the most.  But no official competitions, no pressure.

Yesterday was my first Tuesday practice, after a warm up I completed a simple 80/80 12kg snatch set, then moved on to some swings.  I did a "30" rep themed workout in class last Saturday that I loved so much that I thought I'd practice the progressions again so I can remember it for a future workout video routine.  I'm calling it 1-2-3.

1-2-3- uses 5 swing combinations that are practiced in sets of 10, 20, and 30.

2 hand swing
transfer swings
swing ladders
5/5
10/10 (15/15)

Here is the warm up, 200 swings, 10 minutes, where each combination is done in 2 sets of 10 and one set of 20.



The main workout repeats each combination 10, 20, 30 rep sets for 300 swings, 15 minutes.  And since it's my day to build up to and do sets of 60-100 I ended the workout stringing all the combinations together for two sets of 60 and one final set of 90 :)