Slowly but surely

With Tough Mudder season ambling towards us in the UK, the lucky folks stateside have had two events already, Gulf Coast and Arizona, granted these are both held in rather warm areas of the world, it means as off today there are six weeks until first event in the UK calendar. I've been putting a few miles under my feet and have been getting quicker with a 7:50 mile the other day, which is the quickest I've done one in since starting to run.

I've also had a chin up bar in the doorway to the kitchen which I was using whenever I exercised previously, though it was a few occasionally, rather than anything dedicated. I started thinking about getting myself over obstacles after writing my other blog posts and realised I needed to up my game in terms of the strength to get myself over obstacles, if I can't get my self over things all I've done is put hot air onto the internet and with the people I'm teaming up with, I'll look like a bit of a fool.

So I've started pushing myself to do little and often, I was always able to do a couple of chin ups but pull ups were out of the question as they use muscles differently to chin ups.

So I started with sets of 2-3 which progressed to sets of 5, then slowly going up to a 10 set, of course the effort to get yourself off the ground with only your arms requires a lot of physical exertion to start with, so when I managed my first set of 10 chin ups, I was breathing like I'd just done a 100m sprint. I kept doing sets of chin ups for a couple of weeks and then thought I would give pull ups a try and managed 1 pull up with fully extended arms, finally I'm getting somewhere.

I've been persevering and now I'm doing sets of 5 pull ups, then 5 chin ups, I did manage to do 7 pull ups, which felt good, so I can improve even more, hopefully I'll get onto sets of 10 for each, then get press ups improved.