Weekend Exercise

I spent several hours on Saturday lopping my driveway hedges down to a third of their height with the hopes that all this Spring rain and warming temps will cause the privets to leaf out and not up. The persistently invasive Oriental Bittersweet vines are already leafing but luckily, their striped stems are readily identifiable this early in the season. By mid-summer those vines will have become a solid brown with ladders of protruding stems entwined in everything they come across.

I could use the branch loppers for most of the hedge trunks but at least half a dozen needed sawing. (Luckily, my husband found a reciprocating saw in the garage and tackled those.) Some of the shrubs could be managed if I braced one handle arm against my chest and used both hands to pull the opposing arm to me. Sort of like a bizarre DB fly with a great deal of constant squeezing. 

I'm surprised that I'm not sore. More surprising is that my phone's health app has recorded that my bout with the hedges generated thousands of steps more than my usual weekend endeavors. As a matter of fact, the health app says I've taken more steps this week than most weeks in the past several months. And I don't recall doing anything different, except maybe I've been to the store a lot, and a bit of spring cleaning. Shopping and cleaning as exercise?

My lower back and sciatica aren't bothering me although my hammertoes did spasm and stop me in my tracks for a few minutes. I'm all spacey this morning but I attribute that to the changeable weather and pressure systems. And getting up in the dark when all I want to do is rollover and go back to sleep. I'm not good with napping. Not only is it hard to sleep when morning peaks into your windows, but apparently, it's not good for you either! (Click here for that article.) And I'm the type of person that not only needs the lights out, but no sounds either. My husband went to sleep with a phone app that played the sound of heavy rain falling. Except it gave me anxious insomnia until I put earplugs in. Because all my mind registered was that somewhere it was going to flood inside the house. 

While cardio was a struggle today, I surprised myself with pull-ups. Core routine was again very routine. The Step Mill freaked out a bit when I hit the Stop button after 10 minutes and lost all the rest of the data I normally collect... Oh well. I did 5 minutes at Speed 8 and then 5 at 7 because today the machine was hovering around 67 most of the time when it didn't drop to 60. Such a finicky device!

4 April 2021
Frosty Monday Morn

Precor elliptical
Program 1
Time: 30 min + 5 min cd (5584)
Distance: 2.83
Cal: 314
Avg Hr 84-141, 196 max

HGPU 22

Crunches 60
Piriformis/Hip/Pencil Stretch
60 Dead Bugs
Elbow Plank 60s
Quick Child’s Pose
Cat stretch 12x
Fire Hydrants 25 x 2
Bird Dogs 60s x 2
Child’s Pose
Push-Ups 30
Air Squats 25
Mild Mat stretch w 3 Eye Yoga

HGPU 21

Matrix StepMill (L)
Manual 10 min
Speed 8, 7 at 5 min each (60-67)
Step 634
Floors
Calories
Heart Rate