Off Season Day 51

Aug 18 Rest
Aug 19 Agility, Arms, Vikings Training
Aug 20 Knights Training

On August 18 I had finally had a rest day.  Although I moved some big furniture around and up stairs the rest of the day was casual and relaxed.  Calf muscles were almost crippling first thing in the morning, but within a few hours the tenderness had reduced to some quite specific points deep within the lower calves and there was no pain to speak of for the rest of the day.  I am thinking it was an extreme case of 'muscle soreness'.

I took advantage of the mild winter weather on August 19 to do my agility drills out under the back veranda.  Took about 20 minutes to go through sets of Forward and Backward Line Drills, Lateral Line Drill, Split Leg Shuffle and Split Leg 45' Shuffle.  Reps were between five and ten seconds each for the line drills, five seconds for the much simpler shuffle patterns.  I did five reps per set and kept the rest intervals between sets to 25 seconds.  The patterns were less confusing to my feet than they had been the first time I tried them.

I went straight from my Agility circuit to my arm strength circuit.  Kept up patterns of twin circuits of ten reps for each type of lift.  I am trying to increase the tempo of the lifts themselves, and have now reduced recovery time to 1 minute.  I might hold it here for a while as this was a challenge at a couple of moments in the circuit.

A couple hours later I set off for Vikings Training at Gawler.  There was a fair stress on anaerobic conditioning, with two sets of 'suicide sprints' (line sprint interval training) and a couple commando crawls.  My upper body strength was quite handy for the pushups and the commando crawl but my anaerobic threshold needs to be raised to be able to compete at the higher intensity of sustained anaerobic activity.

On August 20 I limited myself to going to Knights' training.  Don't want to inadvertently overwork myself in the leadup to Vikings finals and the season opener on the ice (besides, I was pretty darn busy sorting things out around the house). Coped pretty well with the aerobic and energy demands, lacking a bit in core strength (sore afterwards) and will need to brush up on skating techniques.