Core Sore

So far this week I've gotten back into the swing of my workouts. But not too aggressively. On Monday I ran for 30 minutes on the treadmill. My heart rate was pretty low so, I was able to hold a pretty nice pace. My form felt pretty good and I was landing right on my midfoot giving me a nice "pop" off the belt. It really felt good to run again and my 10 days off because of the flu didn't seem to hurt my running much. It actually seemed like my body had integrated some of the running techniques I was trying to establish as habits. But maybe I was just glad to be running?

After my run, I did a P90x upper body workout. I really paid for this. While the flu didn't seem to really do much to my running economy or endurance, it did really take a toll on my upper body strength. It wasn't as bad as when I did P90x for the first time but it was pretty close. I was really hating life and pushups after about 30 minutes of my workout. Consequently there was a pretty big drop off from my first set of pushups to my second.

I am also doing a Yoga Teacher Training Certification course. Aside from being behind in learning my asanas because of missing two classes, I'm also behind on my yoga classes. Part of the hours in the certification come from going to about 5 yoga classes a week. So this week, even though I picked different teachers, the three classes I managed to make it to had some sort of focus on core strength. Now add to this the 15 minutes of Hell I've experienced 2 times this week because of Ab RipperX from the P90x workouts and all I can say is now I'm having a hard time sleeping. Did you know you use your core muscles for stabilization while you sleep? Neither did I. At least not until this week of AbRipperX and Yoga.

In fact in one class we were doing headstands but the caveat was that we weren't allowed to "kick" our legs up and use momentum. We had to raise them with control using our core. Needless to say after class my abs were spasming just from getting into my car. I'll let you in a little secret. There probably isn't an intermediate to advanced Yoga posture that doesn't engage the core muscles in some way. All I can say is at this point I'd rather do an Ironman than more Yoga. You have no idea how much pain I'm in. And I have Yoga class again tomorrow....