ITBS, Fatigue, Puke

Today was fun. On and off rain all day.

At lunch, Taylor and Bryan joined me for PT, as well as a new guy, Phil. He's a cross-rate from the Army. Good guy. Same story: wants to get in extreme shape, so he jumped in. Not a good day to start. You'll see why.

Started with the regular 3.5 mile route through Hickam officer's housing. Taylor wanted to pick it up a bit today since the slower guys didn't come with us. 25:26, or roughly 7 minute miles. Didn't work out so well for Bryan. His ITBS apparently wasn't completely recovered, and it flared again. Taylor was pleasantly surprised, although being fatigued from the effort, because that was right on pace for him to meet his goal: 4 miles in 28 minutes. Phil did well for his first outing with the BAMF team at lunch. Kept on our heels the entire distance.

Now for the PT. I decided to toss in one of the workouts from the SEAL book, just to give them a taste, and to show that I REALLY had been going easy on them.
The evolution:
Pushups: 6 max outs. 2 x regular, 2 x diamond, 2 x wide
Pretty much, go until failure, rest a minute, repeat.

Pullups: Starting with 1, increasing consecutively until failure. At max reps, switch to reverse grip and go back down the pyramid.

Situps: 2x25 Crunches and reverse crunches. 1x50 side crunches

Recover, then 2 minute max for pushups and situps, and max pullups.

I was pleasantly surprised that I made it through without much pain, just a bit of discomfort easily overcome by a change in mental state. Bryan is showing the emergence of a beast! He almost kept up with me for number of reps, and we failed at the same time in most sets. Awesome!
Taylor is doing fantastic for an older guy. I hope I can still do this stuff in 15 years.
Phil dug in deep and did awesome for his first "beat down."

I'm not sure what we all did for totals, but I can say with confidence that it was well over 5 or 600 pushups, including the final max out. Bryan and I failed at 7 pullups in the ascending pyramid, then went down. We both maxed out at 10 at the end. See the beast yet?
Taylor made it to 5, and Phil got to 4. Pullups always seem to be the hardest for everyone joining me. I still suck at them.
Charles, remember when I'd go the the Weary Center to do the 150 pull up workout? Geez! I'm way off...

Crunches were a breeze. And the max outs at the end weren't too bad. I spent a good 3 minutes trying to convince the guys that it wouldn't be that bad since their muscles were used to working when they were on the brink of failure. The didn't believe me, complained that the arms wouldn't work, etc. But then when we maxed out, all of them did close to the same amount they get when they're fresh. I told them so! ;-) After about a minute, none of us could do anymore without falling, so we just held the plank. That sucked sicne our arms were shaking and our abs were going into spasms.
The next logical step was to max out on situps as our abs tried to recover. Quite fun! I was surprised to find that even though I struggled at the end in having to rest a second or two after each situp, I could always do one more. Same with the others. Cool!

Pullups are weird. My arms don't hurt when they fail, they just don't work. When the fail doing pushups, they hurt on the failed one, and hurt as I'm recovering. Not so for pullups. I'm on rep 9, and suddenly, rep 10 feels impossible. I feel my grip sliding, struggle to get my chin over the bar, then try one more. Doesn't happen. Can't...pull...up! Dropping to the ground, the arms feel fresh. WTF?

I kind of felt bad afterwards because Bryan's knee hurt from the ITBS, Taylor said he liked it, but I could tell he was hurting when his arms were shaking trying to eat a sandwich, and Phil puked alot in the locker room. Tremendous effort from all parties!