Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here.
Not the greatest of weeks on the surface of it, but it could have been considerably worse. My wife is still suffering from post-holiday Covid, and on Monday I felt truly awful. Fortunately it didn’t last more than a couple of days and I chanced a ride on Wednesday, where I found myself fine enough.
The downside to starting later in the week, and doing all outdoor rides meant I was fatigued by the weekend and needed the rest day. That meant only four rides this week, bringing my totals lower than last week.
- Wednesday – Fourth Time Unlucky? (Outdoors)
- Thursday – Sports Day (Outdoors)
- Friday – Hottest Day Of The Year… So Far (Outdoors)
- Sunday – Sprinting and Grinding (Outdoors)
Of the rides I did get in this week, Tuesday and Friday were decent lengths. I’d have loved to get out to do the Trough of Bowland but that’s still proven difficult. Hopefully I can get that boxed off in the week ahead.
This week’s riding was mostly just tempo and distance stuff, but I did throw in some sprint work yesterday to switch things up. Not my favourite of activities, but essential every once in a while.
We’ve been lucky with the weather also during the last week – and I believe in the week ahead we get more of the same – so outdoors is where it’s at. I’m kinda wondering why I’m paying for Zwift at the moment though.
On my mind lately has been how I broke the habit / completely stopped doing push ups.
Back at the start of May I decided to aim for 200 push ups a day as a target. When I started I could barely do any. But as we got towards the end of May I had hit 200.
The problem, however, was that my form was awful.
Somehow in my push to hit 200 I managed to blow out my legs. I thought push ups were about upper body, so how I messed up my legs kinda indicates how bad my form was.
What is disappointing though is that I never resumed once my legs improved. It would have been better to do a smaller number, but do them properly, rather than just aim to smash out an arbitrary number regardless of how useful the motion was.
This week I’m going to look to start up again, with a better technique.
Weight-wise, never overly fussed about this. It’s ‘interesting’ to track, but the way I do it is pretty useless so I don’t put much… ahem, weight on the readings.
Anyway, no concerns here. The holiday beer paunch has disappeared and that’s pretty much good enough for me. Water retention, you see.
Unsurprisingly after the start to the week the training status is all messed up again.
I ride when I want to ride, so really it’s just a pretty picture to me. Hopefully if the week ahead goes to plan I shall be a little more consistent on the chart though. Anything >30km over the next 5 rides is good enough for my needs.
So yeah, plans for the week are to ride the Trough of Bowland, do 5 rides, and anything more than that is a bonus.
The other plan is to re-start the push up routine.
Let’s see how we get on.