New Exercise Routine

There's a chipmunk around here that will let me feed it seeds by hand.  I lay my hand down, and it eats out of my palm.  Sometimes it even climbs into my hand.  I'm pretty sure it's the same chipmunk every time.  Whenever I leave the house, it runs around my ankles and begs me for seeds.  And it never gets full.  I think it just carries the seeds off in it's cheeks and stashes them away, returning for more without eating them, in the hopes of stocking up for future need.

It's actually getting kind of annoying.  It follows me everywhere and just begs and begs, and it never gets tired of it.  I think I will name him.  I'm going to name him Beggar or Panhandler or something.  I'll get back to you guys.

Well, it's been what, four or five months since coming back from CWY?  I lost 30 pounds in Mali.  If I was going to gain them back, would it have happened by now?  I hope so, because I just weighed myself, and it turns out that I have gained back half of what I lost.  This doesn't really bother me, because it still counts as losing 15 pounds overall.  That is to say, if I've leveled out and am staying consistent at this point, instead of slowly but consistently working on those other 15 pounds.

I'm tentatively hoping that some of the weight increase belongs to muscle, although I'm not naive enough to say that it all comes from that.  I've been doing that daily exercise routine somewhat more faithfully than my daily blogging routine.  I've increased the difficulty of the routine recently.  I used to do a set of 30 push-ups, 30 sit-ups, and 30 leg raises.  Now I... still do 30 push-ups, but I've become stricter about the quality of the first ten.  See, I wasn't exactly putting my nose to the ground each time before, but now I do 10 nose-to-the-ground style and let myself get a little lazier with the other 20.  I've added an extra 10 sit-ups, so now I do 40.  I haven't changed my policy on leg raises because it's just less gratifying to be good at leg raises, for some reason.  They only seem to be considered a staple in the karate world.

I've also added a one minute plank and a one minute wall sit.  If you don't know what those are, a wall sit is sitting in front of a wall.  Pretty self-explanatory.  The catch is you don't get a chair, but you sit like you are.  The plank is balancing on your elbows and toes, holding your torso in the position of a plank of wood, I guess.  They're both stress positions.  The plank is really good for your core, whatever that means.

Timing it was a little difficult at first.  I counted in my head to determine when I could stop.  I knew, though, that my mental counting is slower than clock counting, because I used to count in my head while I was doing these positions during Karate, and time was always up before I finished my count.  I start fast, but the mental count slows down as time passes.  I guess that's because my coherent mind sort of shuts down when I gasp.  That meaning, when I'm gasping, I'm only thinking about gasping.  So I wind up counting like "One Mississippi (gasp) two Mississippi (gasp)" and the count slows by the wasted time of the gasp.

I use that old school trick of saying "Mississippi" between numbers to make the count more accurate, although I was originally taught to say "Hippopotamus".  I was ripping myself off, though, because Mississippi has four syllables, whereas Hippopotamus has five.  By that logic, I guess the number seven makes for the longest second, because it has two syllables instead of one, and even if you use the trick of using only the first nine numbers on the count until the tenth number, no matter what set of ten you're doing, twenty, thirty, fourty etc. will always have that extra syllable.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.  I'm sure I don't have to convince you guys that the mental count system is flawed.  Although, staying in the vein of the hippopotamus count, "Hippopotamus" in Bambara is "Mali".  Think how my plank position would improve by the Malian count system "One mali two mali (gasp) three mali four mali (gasp)".  I'd be going double speed!

Although I'd probably have to count in Bambara, too.  Kele mali, fila mali, sava mali, nani mali, duru mali, woro mali, worovila mali, segi mali konondo mali, ta mali.

Sheez, everything except "Mali" is longer in Bambara.  Still, I'd be dropping from six syllables to three in most cases.  Except for with worovila and konondo.

Yeah, so whatever.  I found a digital clock, and now I can just stare at the digital clock until it changes number.  The first day I did the one minute plank, I caved three seconds before the clock changed.  The next day, I caved one second early.  On the third day, which is today, I made it all the way.  So I've increased my plank by at least four seconds in a span of three days.  I'll take that.  I used to be able to hold a minute-long plank with only moderate strain.

With the addition of the wall sit and the plank, I'm basically doing a set and a half of stations.  In Karate, we'd do maybe three sets of stations per lesson.  So I'm doing maybe half that.  Of course, we had stretches, additional exercises, and performing the techniques themselves had a somewhat physically strenuous side to them.

There were a lot of classic exercises, but pushups, situps, leg raises, wall sit, and plank were kind of staples.  To really recreate that environment, I should be doing suicides, too.  Suicides were just running up and down the dojo, with an increasingly distant goal on each sprint.  I don't really know why they were called "Suicides" as they were one of the easier exercises.  It was like the "Fatal Four" stretch.  I'd heard it called the Figure Four, too, which is as humble a name as it deserves, since it's a stretch of mediocre difficulty that consists of you contorting your figure to look like the number four.