Second Day of Maximum Strength

The second day of the Maximum Strength program came and went just like that, but the pain resides.

Risking Life and Limb and Car Tire to Work Out

The problem in this town when it snows is not the snow itself. Because really, how much damage can 2 inches of snow make? No, the problem is that Asheville doesn't have enough resources to properly salt all of the roads, which is where all of the slippin' and slidin' goes on. This was definitely the case with the roads in our community before we got to the main roads. On our drive to the gym, my wife Kate worked up a sweat just by freaking out about all of the ice on the roads. I think I may have soiled my pants a little, too. But despite this roadblock, we made it to the gym for Day 2, interval training.

The Workout

Just like Eric Cressey instructs in the book, we did our foam rolling and mobility drills prior to our high intensity interval training (HIIT). Here's Kate rolling her infraspinatus:

Don't let this picture fool you, she's not napping on the gym floor, but rather slowly reacting to the smelling salts I had to use to revive her after passing out from the pain of rolling this damned ball under her infraspinatus. You know, this would be a great tool to interrogate terrorists. Just roll a ball on some shady bastard's infraspinatus and make him tell us where the terrorist leaders are! Who needs waterboarding.

Here's Kate doing some X-band walks:

And a very hazy picture of the elliptical warmup:

Being that I was still trying to nurse a slight hammie injury, I wanted to do some sort of energy work but nothing that would make it worse. So we opted for the elliptical trainer, since the movement is limited in range of motion (good in my case). Now before you say anything about ellipticals being for wimps, let me tell you that anything is easy if you just go through the motions. The opposite is true that if you go all out on even the easiest machine, you'll be sweating like one of the Biggest Loser contestants being sat down in front of a mountain of pizza with all the fixin's. "Are you gonna eat that, chubby lubby?"

Yes, the elliptical made us wince today. And sweat. And hungry as hell. But we'll be back again next week on the elliptical and handle it by its proverbial reigns (or handles), dig our heels in (or just put our feet on the pedals, whatever) and ride that metal horse into the sunset. Actually the sunrise, being that we workout at six in the morning. And even so it would be difficult to ride into the sunrise being that our "metal horse" sits two feet in front of a large mirror so it might actually break the glass and cut us all up. So let's just say that we'll be back next week and train hard. Yeah, that sounds good.