Beast Mode: Coming to a close and facing reality

If you've been following the blog lately, then you know I did something of a month-long tribute to the 2011 Beijing Intensive, now at a close, by upping my working out and training regimen to what I termed "Beast Mode." In all, it must have been fairly effective: in the process, I've lost about eight pounds and dropped from 21% to 16.5% bodyfat, according to my scale, which probably isn't very accurate on either of those points. So... I improved significantly in my fitness via hard training coupled with hard conditioning workouts (and a fair amount of hard yard work). How'd my bagua go? Well... that might be another matter.

Beast Mode: Post-burnout workout, promised and delivered

It's only been about three hours since my last post (which will challenge you if you're a one-a-day kind of reader). That post was about burnout keeping me from maintaining my Beast Mode status so well over the last week. It also suggested some tips for you to beat and overcome your own burnout issues when training too frequently and too hard gets you down. This is a continuation, delivering on my promise to update you with another Beast Mode workout that I'm using to improve myself and celebrate the ongoing 2011 Beijing Intensive for Yin Style Baguazhang.

Beast Mode: Burnout and what to do about it

Beast Mode is wearing on me. In fact, over the last week and especially for the last three days, despite doing some decent workouts and training in that time, I definitely cannot call what's going on "Beast Mode" any longer. I hit burnout, which I could have predicted. It's beyond the problem characterized in my last post about not having enough to eat for my training (which I've decided is mostly because of my head injury leading to a wrecked sense of smell and therefore taste leading to almost everything currently tasting really bad, sort of like vomit). This is straight up "I've done enough hard workouts for now" style burnout.

Beast Mode and eating -- calorie intake and overtraining

So... Beast Mode is catching up with me, apparently. I haven't lost the mental fire and have kept pushing myself to do the workouts at my fullest capacity, but honestly, over the last several days, the physical gusto has just kind of been dwindling. This happened one day last week too. I noticed it particularly during last night's conditioning workout (details below) and in essentially everything I did with my training today. My body just feels tired and heavy, and the will to keep going is twice as hard as usual to maintain. I would figure that this is a symptom of overtraining, but I don't have any of the other primary symptoms of that issue right now (elevated heart rate upon waking, poor sleep, etc.). The problem is, I believe, undereating.

Beast Mode -- Heavy metal workout and line-stepping drills into infinity

Beast Mode continues! Much of the workout stuff is the same as the last several Beast Mode posts -- lots of turning and standing, then lots of striking and forms drilling, and then hard-ass conditioning workouts, pretty much every day. It's fun. Our group training session from this past Monday is worth noting, and I'll take this post to finally get around to describing my heavy metal (a.k.a. heavy weapons) conditioning workout that I toss in there every third day or so, usually before or after some hard-labor-style yard work involving a shovel and moving a lot of earth, mulch, and other yard rot (compost pile).

Beast Mode -- a much-needed rest and hitting it hard again

Apparently, rest days are important, even during Beast Mode training. Yesterday's training consisted only of a half an hour of turning, mostly Phoenix with some Lion, and a half an hour of forms at medium pace and power, kind of like amplified learning speed. Yesterday's conditioning was only a grip-training routine and 60 squat thrusts. Done, and done, because apparently so was my body. Today, however, I picked it back up.

Beast Mode continues, and you need a GymBoss!

So much for daily posts! The Beast Mode daily workouts have been continuing, though, and they're apparently going well enough because I've got a classic overtraining symptom: nearly constantly elevated body temperature. Here's some of the stuff I've been up to over the last few days.

Beast Mode, Day 1 -- Training to prepare for a lunar perigee Super Moon

First of all, just in case you don't know: the current full moon is occurring at lunar perigee (use Google or Wikipedia or something if you don't know what that means), and lots of hee-haws are calling it a Super Moon and predicting all kinds of calamity that is very unlikely to have anything to do with the lunar perigee, which happens a little more than once a month, just because it coincides with the full moon, i.e. the moon is on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, a coincidence that happens roughly once every 18 years. The only calamity that I'm aware of is Beast Mode (what I'm calling my ramped-up training right now) Day 1, which was pretty hard.