Hugh

Yes. Yes it does

This is the wellspring from which all cures flow (especially when it comes to "toxic drama")

Well, a good few days filming for a documentary. No sword fighting but got some exercise in the form of dragging two condemned prisoners up a slope on a wooden sledge... then hoisting them up on a rope to hang! The torture scene was less physically strenuous but got to stretch some rarely used acting muscles (documentary for an Irish language channel about Irish prisoners in the tower of London throughout history) Monday was swimming day. Yesterday we hit the gym - yay for squat rack! (means I can actually try the stronglifts 5x5 program) Today we'll be swimming again. This evening: Karate!

I think I've found a nice place for a night's camping. Probably next weekend

Got some coconut oil for the first time. Gonna keep it simple for now and use it to cook up some bacon and eggs

used it again today, briefly. Split my trousers pretty much from waistband to waistband... That'll teach me to do deep squats while wearing cheap tracksuit trousers LOL

well, I'm a happy man. It turns out the "gym" I have access to on my course has little armatures that attach to the smith machine to make, wait for it.... A SQUAT RACK!! Yay! Also doubles as a rack for bench presses etc. So I can no work on proper barbell squats

Hi there. Just to let you all know, on a public forum, Spezzy has been nominated for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

Spezzy (as I don't actually know her, I wanted to give her a heads up first - she and Steve Kamb are kind of the "faces" of NF so I figured one of them would be a good choice. If I'm brutally honest I then thought to myself "which of those two would I rather see pouring a bucket of water over themselves..." ) Of course, you don't need to wait to be nominated if you want to do it. Just sayin'...

oh, and there's this...

Can the Guild Leaders change user names..? Just wondering

OK then. I'll do my best... mainly worked on forward crawl on Monday. Key points: keep the face pointing down in the water, exhaling smoothly, for two strokes and on the third you bring your chin towards the upper shoulder and breath in quickly, sucking air in with the corner of the mouth (a "Popeye mouth" is the term we keep using). Taking a breath on every third stroke will result in alternating turning head to each side on each breath, every third stroke. Timing the smooth exhalation with the strokes takes a little practice... as does inhaling without sucking in splashing water! Practice, practice, practice. Keeping the face in the water (water level at hairline kind of area) helps keep spine neutral and legs straight behind you. Lifting face out of water will cause legs to drop too low, creating drag. Maintain neutral alignment my squeezing glutes. Kick from the hips, not from the knees. Keep ankles flexible - avoid dorsiflexion. Most of the propulsion comes from the arms in the crawl - the kicking is supplemental propulsion and drag reduction. Thursday we did inverted breast stroke, ways to approach and level a drowning victim and side stroke. Inverted breast stroke uses just the legs in a "frog kick" to propel yourself backwards. On back in water, bring knees up, turn feet out to sides and kick out forcefully out to the sides and arcing down. Repeat as momentum wanes. This is easy enough but much harder when dragging a casualty by the head! This is done by holding the victim's head on each side, fingers near the jaw-line, palms over the ears. It's a fairly slow moving rescue but you can keep it going for quite a while without getting too fatigued. Approaches are simple enough. Rear approach is easy enough. Self explanatory. Leveling requires being behind the victim, reaching round to put hand under chin, elbow of same arm presses into the back between the shoulder blades and the casualty will tilt back onto their back. Front surface approach is used with an unconscious, face down casualty. You grab their right wrist with your right hand (or left with left) and lift straight up - this spins them round and lifts them straight up, popping the head above the surface. once like this, you level them as with the rear approach using your other hand. Diving front approach is used with a conscious and panicking casualty. about 5 meters from the victim, you dive under the surface and as you reach them you put a hand behind one of his knees and pull towards you while pushing his other knee away from you - this instantly spins him round 180 degrees. Rise up out of the water behind him, maintaining contact, and level him as above. We briefly touched on the side stroke but I haven't quite got the hang of it so I won't go into it.

Swimming yesterday daytime. Good chance to practice what we learned on Monday. Karate yesterday evening. Good kata practice. Good session on the kick pads. Two swim training sessions today. Very tiring but good stuff. Chilling this evening. Tiger Strength Training tomorrow. Energy permitting, I'll break out the 24kg KB and unleash the beast!

Well, that depends on who or what the tiger is fighting, what the climate is, what kind of training the tiger ha had, etc... And, yeah. It's cool! Rescuing damsels is a rarity to be honest as it's not really part of our show (yet). I just grabbed the nearest one when the camera appeared So... Yesterday my primary Anthropomorphic Animal Motivation Character / Spirit Guide, the Karate Newt, was reminded of his aquatic roots. Our new instructor and swim teacher finally made an appearance (Honestly, we kept hearing about her but her timetable kept getting put back and we had become convinced she was just made up and the company was desperately searching for a teacher who had the right name and qualifications). We did a coupe of hours of intensive swim training. Properly structured swim training with a proper teacher! I learned more about swimming during those two hours than I have in the past 30 years! We should be doing a couple of hours at least twice a week until we do lifeguard training. Yay! The instructor found a good way to keep the attention of the class, mostly young men. That is by being a very fit and attractive young woman - I've never seen them all shut up so quickly! Lots of shy grinning and childish antics then ensued Today I managed some good kata practice while the others did some sort of football-tennis... Hit the gym and deadlifted heavy stuff. Didn't really have a proper gym plan... so deadlifted more stuff. And then some more. Ran out of weights to put on the bar (less than 100kg - I think there are less weights in the gym now....) so went on to machines: Lat pull down & chest press. Threw in some push ups and squats. A little bit of an undisciplined workout but a fairly strenuous one. Tired now and I'll just leave this here... (Ps, I know none of those critters are Newts)

Warmed up with walking, jogging, running and sprinting followed by animal flow drills and stretching. Did some gentle strength training to loosen up my slightly aching muscles. Then did a proper sprint session Maxed out the treadmill twice but still with 60 sec active recovery. Next week I'll be looking at 45 secs recovery... I felt like this: I won't speculate on how I looked but basically, I ran really fast a few times, swore loudly at the treadmill, ran even faster a few times and just about managed to make rude gestures at the treadmill before collapsing.

Back to the normal grind today... ...And yet more disruption in out pool / gym timetable thanks to inconsiderate or incompetent hotel management. This time however, I was prepared for either gym or pool so managed a good Tiger Strength / Beast mode session. Finished with a couple of sprints just for the hell of it Karate this evening. Worked on katas, primarily weapons, and the primary black belt kata:Naihanch Shodan.

Actually I've already done a fair few sessions with both older folks and people with disabilities. Right now, I'm considering myself a student / unemployed, rather than self employed - accepting that lets me focus on the course work and not on seeking clients. These certs are just handy bits of paper to add to the CV if I apply for jobs or seek work among "special populations". Interesting stuff and a nice change of pace from the more academic centered stuff we've been doing thus far.

Well, Thursday saw my return to the gym. Beast Mode Ensued. Did a good bit of animal flow exercising to warm up, push ups, plyo-push-ups, squats, jump squats, hanging shrugs, lat pull-downs, chest press machine, etc. My inner Tiger, Rugshasa was with me for my Beast Mode Strength Training! And the last few chest presses and lat pull-downs needed the inner Silverback to emerge! And as there were only a few of us, I also channeled Chamotah! Interval Sprints FTW I felt like this: I maxed out the treadmill twice but I did probably look more like this... My routine and my keeping a food diary has been a bit disrupted... Splinter is a bit cross. And my inner Wolverine, Caesar, is wondering when the hell I'm gonna take to the hills for a bit of outdoors time. I keep telling him, Soon. Busy weekend of sword fighting and rescuing damsels. OK, that's an older pic and there weren't ant damsels but it was still a good weekend Yesterday and today I was attending workshops for certification in teaching "older adults" and people with disabilities. This meant no actual gym time but we did loads of activities and games. Ran through my Katas. Karate Newt strikes again!

Karate this evening, so it's not a total loss. Wednesday's kinda my rest / active recovery day anyway so I don't begrudge not using the gym, I was just looking forward to a nice swim... and the hot tub. They're a bit funny about anyone detaching from the class, otherwise I would have. I got some "chair aerobics" in this morning though, so that was something. also two and a half hours of karate class this evening

Grrr. Feeling better today but gym/swim timetable has been moved around due to bad organization, so here I am sitting outside the fitness suite on my laptop instead of getting a nice relaxing swim in...

yesterday evening: ran through katas but that's about it. Didn't get a proper workout in. Today: wasn't feeling great but managed a vaguely intense strength workout. Practiced some katas. Did some animal flow exercises as warm up / cool down.

Will add a little something to this a bit later, when I get home...

Chamotah it is! So, Friday was Chamotah day. All good. Animal flow and sprints. Saturday was a swordfighting gig. Weather was not great (lashing rain all day) so we finished early without doing a single proper show Yesterday: Rest. Today (bank holiday so day off from course): to be updated

yeah, I was kinda expecting it to happen but not quite so... weird. So, Monday was a good "beast mode" training day. Tuesday saw some experimenting with animal flow drills. But I hadn't properly outlined my challenge so wasn't in the zone fully. Karate last night. Assisted again with the juniors. Long session with the seniors as no one had anywhere to be (over-ran by 40 mins! yay!). Good kata practice all across the board. Warmed up with some gentle cardio, some core work and the aforementioned six animal flow exercises. I'm liking the animal flow stuff. Good for mobility Today I went all out on my Tiger Strength Training, with a little bit of Silverback Gorilla "beast mode" just to be sure! Did a strength based interval set for about 20 minutes. Included some push ups and squats, kettlebell swings, kettlebell C&Ps, chest press machine, lat pull down machine. Dripping sweat by the end of it! Got a few funny looks grunting like a monster with my last few reps on some of the exercises... but what can I do? Not grunt? My Spirit guide for the day (the unnamed Silverback) would not be down with that! Food diary mostly ok. forgot to note todays lunch but I know what it was (today kinda became this week's treat day due to oversleeping and relying on shop bought lunch) so will note it down tomorrow (my log is with my course gear and is inaccessible at this moment). Got to do some sneaky kata practice by saying I wanted to do a little extra warming up before some games Tomorrow: more animal flow and sprints, as it's non-beast day. My spirit guides will be the "bendy lizard" and the cheetah!

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn...