6 Week Body Weight Workout Challenge - Week 2 summary
I got through week two, took a few days, and then did my second failure test.
Here are the results:
Situps: 135
Pushups 25
Squats: 126
Dips: 26
So I doubled my strength in all the categories! I start week three on Monday!
Motivation!
Amen! Health is about health - plain and simple. It’s about taking care of your body so you can feel good and live a longer and more active life.
![survivincollege:
GET TO SLEEP. Seriously Stop Pulling Those All Nighters
According to a report published in the journal SLEEP by scientists from Netherlands and the United Kingdom, lack of sleep and physical stress are equally detrimental and can adversely affect our immune system. [more]
You’ve got to take care of your body, people! Step one is a full night’s rest, so be sure to get it in every night.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7d2nsNcvZ1qmvcowo1_400.jpg)
GET TO SLEEP. Seriously Stop Pulling Those All Nighters
According to a report published in the journal SLEEP by scientists from Netherlands and the United Kingdom, lack of sleep and physical stress are equally detrimental and can adversely affect our immune system. [more]
You’ve got to take care of your body, people! Step one is a full night’s rest, so be sure to get it in every night.
Relieving Upper Back Tension
I spend the large majority of my day hunched. At a computer, over papers, reading a book… whatever it is, I’m probably hunching. It’s not that I wasn’t taught good posture - I was, and I tend to have it when I’m standing - it’s that I’m tall and my desk is inevitably too low. Or it’s that when I’m deeply focused, I tend to lean into what I’m doing.
Weight lifting on already tight shoulders and upper back only exacerbates it. Now, I have two kinds of pain: the good, muscle-building kind and the obnoxious, headache-causing hunching kind. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating good stretches for the upper back, since I tend to do my stress-relief on a budget. Massages are expensive, you know.
The one stretch I have found works consistently and immediately is a sort of yoga/desk-stretch hybrid. It’s essentially the upper half of eagle pose. Here’s how to do it.
HelloGiggles – The Fat-Shaming of Kate Upton; or Why I’ll Never Buy The Difference Between “Thinspiration” And “Pro-Ana” Websites (via 4907)
I concur. So many women in the Western world are just not happy with their bodies. It seems everyone is always on a diet. We need to ditch the extremes, and just learn to be healthy and love our bodies. Trust me, I know that is easier said than done.
(via 4907)
“Just sitting is not a technique, or a means to some resulting higher state of consciousness, or any particular state of being. Just sitting, one simply meets the immediate present. Desiring some flashy experience, or anything more or other than this is mere worldly vanity and craving.”
- Taigen Dan Leighton, The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza
(Quote via ludimagister. Photo via babydoll1976. Source: Meditation by Austin Kaseman On Flickr
Just looking at this photo makes me feel peaceful. Meditation is so simple, and yet so elusive. It’s worth a few minutes every day to start - and you might just find that you can sit longer than you expected once you get in the habit!
(Source: inhal0)
“Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.”
- Ilchi Lee
(Photo via likaloveslife. Quote via hearthisvoice)
6 Week Body Weight Workout Challenge - Week 1 summary
So on Monday, I started the routine as prescribed on the one hundred pushups website (links to all the other exercises on the sidebar of that page). Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were pushups and dips, and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday were situps and squats.
I’m already amazed at how many more of each kind of exercise I’m doing. For example, in my initial test, I was only able to do 12 dips. Yesterday, my sets for dips were: 10, 13, 9, 9, and 13. That’s right, I did more dips in two of my sets than I could at all in my first test only a week ago.
I can’t wait to see how my strength continues to grow. Results are exciting, people! And aside from some soreness and shaky legs on my post-squat runs, I haven’t had any problems. Some early wrist and elbow soreness on the pushups was fixed when I started using pushup handles (lifesavers, I tell you!)
Anyone else out there doing this? I would love to hear from you!
