Thursday, July 3, 2014

Lower and Upper Body Plyo Workout

Yesterday evening I did a lower body and upper body plyo workout of my own design for the first time.  The upper body exercises were from a similar workout I did last summer.  I included some lower body plyo moves to help improve my running efficiency from this article from Runner's World. I included some uphill and downhill sprinting as suggested in an article I read a couple months ago in Runner's Digest.

Here's the lower body sequence:
  1. Uphill sprints, 8 x 10 sec: between each sprint, I took about 50 sec to walk back and recover.
  2. Power skips, 20 per leg, with about a 30-s break.
  3. Leg bounding, 20 sec: with about a 40-s break.
  4. Downhill sprints, 8 x 10 sec: between each sprint, 1 took about 50 sec to walk back and recover.
  5. Repeat 2 and 3.
The high school near me has a straight sidewalk on an incline that I used for the sprints.  Initially I thought that a total of 160 sec of sprinting wouldn't be too hard, but they really were pretty tough.  I had planned to add a round of level sprinting, but I decided to save that as an add-on for once these feel a little easier.

After this was all complete, I shifted to the cinder-block tennis wall and did the upper body moves.  Most of them involve an 8-lb medicine ball.  I chose these moves to do because they were recommended for tennis on this sports fitness advisor page.
Here's the upper body sequence:
  1.  Overhead throws, 8 throws
  2.  Side throws, 8 throws per side
  3.  Overhead slams, 8 throws
  4.  Squat throws, 8 throws
  5.  Plyo push-ups, 8
I repeated this sequence 4 more times, with about 90 sec of rest in between.

A few comments: the lower body plyo work in this workout is by no means complete.  I haven't included a lot of jumping, because I do that in morning workouts, such as P90X2 Plyocide.  In this workout, for both lower and upper body, I'm focusing on exercises that I really can't do inside.  Also, the point of this workout is not to improve cardio fitness, so I didn't do the moves as fast as I could.  The idea is to be rested (somewhat) before each move, so that you can really put all your effort into it.  So there are a lot of breaks.

I am definitely feeling my legs this morning, especially the hamstrings.  I'm hoping to be able to do this workout 1 - 2 times per week.  I didn't have time for it when my tennis teams were in season, so these next couple of months are my chance.

This morning, I did FOCUS T25 Gamma Rip't Up (124 cal), followed by Insanity Cardio Abs.  I was definitely still fatigued from yesterday's plyo work.  I used 12-lb weights, but I had to take more breaks than when I previously did Rip't Up.  I burned about 205 calories total.  Yesterday marked the start of my last round through my FOCUS T25 workouts.  I think I need a recovery week after next week.

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