A couple of weeks ago I finished a 9 week challenge that my Muay Thai school: Kombat Arts held. I tracked my progress pretty faithfully and that lead to me making some good improvements in all the areas we tested. I really liked the idea of having a set of numbers to strive for / beat and I think that brought out a level of determination in me that I didn’t have before. Since it worked so well for me, I’m going to start off my own 9 week challenge tomorrow.

I want to get in good enough shape to compete and if I can keep focused and make similar progress jumps like I did in the last challenge then I will get there with time. So, starting tomorrow, I’m doing another 63 day countdown. During the last challenge I made some big jumps and it will be tough to match them, but I’m going to try. I’m also going to add in a couple of new goals to strive for as well.

Here are my starting numbers:

Starting Stats: July 7th, 2008
Weight: 218 - coming off weekend cheat
Pull Ups: 4
Broad Jump: 77 inches
Push Ups: 36
Longest Run: 2.2km
Rope Skipping: can’t do it at all - need a lot of practice to get the movement down

Target Stats: September 9th, 2008
Weight: 198
Pull Ups: 10
Broad Jump: 87 inches
Push Ups: 50
Longest Run: 4.5km
Rope Skipping: 10 minutes continuous

I think that I can reach these if I focus and work hard. But there is a bit of a catch - during the challenge I hit my 1 year goal of getting to 220 and as a reward I got more tattoo work done on my left arm half sleeve. I ended up getting it done this past Saturday and it’ll be about 2 weeks before it’s healed fully. During that 2 weeks, I can’t get sweat on it. Which pretty much rules out any prolonged intense exercise. On top of that, I still have to sit another 2 hours to get it finished - probably halfway through August, which will require another 2 weeks of healing.

So how to keep active, make strength gains and cut fat with an entire month of not being able to sweat? For the 5 weeks I’m not healing, I’m going to really bust my ass. I’m going to make sure I avoid over-training, but otherwise I’m going to do as much work as I can take. For the 4 weeks that I am healing, I’m going to do late-night/early-morning long walks - I’ve already downloaded a bunch of audio books and loaded them onto my iPod. As far as strength work, I’m going to do a lot of micro-sets throughout the day - small bursts of exercise split up over 20-30 instances spread over the day: 10 push ups, 10 squats, 5 pull ups, etc. It won’t be optimal, but it’ll get my heart rate up a bit and at the very least, keep me from losing strength during the healing periods.

It won’t be an official competition or anything like the first one, so I’ll only be competing against myself - but then, that’s really how I looked at the first challenge anyway, so what’s the difference?