Like I said before, I caught a nasty cold virus just before Xmas, and tried to work my way through it, doing heavy chores at the street mission where I volunteer. After going to see my herbalist in Chinatown, I was able to jump right back into my regular workouts. The delay did not seem to affect my ability with the pushups routines at all. I was glad of that.
Now, here is the thing: This pushup workout, going to exhaustion on the last set each time is a great method, but i have been with it for only four years. It is not native to my training. I did not ever push myself to exhaustion in running, or calisthenics. I always felt that i had more gas in the tank.
I have been as high as 320 pushups in a 22 minute workout, and up as high as 89 pushups in the exhaustion set. Currently, 84 is the highest count in the stand alone test without any warm-up reps.
Anyway, I am sick with another respiratory virus again. Just climbing out of the pit right now. The past four days have been sheer hell. This is not the same virus. This one zoomed in so fast and went straight into my deep sinuses. The kind of sinus head pain that can bring you to yer knees. And it also has had a GI factor. I just finished a good breakfast, but have had very little appetite during the sickness. Lots of deep coughing and hacking.
What would have been more sensible would have been to gradually rebuild strength with the yang tonic herbs, but not jump right back into the exhaustion sets. Spend a couple weeks doing just maybe 150 pushups each time.
The other factor is the beer consumption over the past year. As I said before, I was sometimes drinking close to 2 litres of 10.5% beer, spread out over one night, in order to get enough deep sleep. Getting drunk with the funky monk was my method of dealing with the sleeping pill dependence.
Obviously now, I can see that the beer consumption has weakened me a bit. Lately, I can fall asleep after just 150 ml strong beer, and have slept successfully at least two nights without any beer at all.
During the worst part of this latest attack, I did not sleep at all. Too much coughing and hacking all night.
Anyway, I do feel a lot better today. The sun is shining, and it is about -17C at present. I am soon going to go over to shovel snow for the old ladies.
I always learn best the hard way. |