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Week 5: SEAL Training Update

Apologies to my loyal readership for the long delay in posting. The Navy sent me over to Afghanistan to handle a job, and this is my first real opportunity to get another post up here.

SEAL Training is going well, and I'm able to keep up with the escalating difficulty of the schedule. My weight has totally flattened out, but I must still be losing body fat since I'm now down another notch on my belt. I can't imagine how much harder this would be if I had a pool to do the complete circuit.

I'm starting to get the outlines of my old high school wrestling physique back, which I guess shouldn't be much of a surprise since many of the workouts are the same. Doing all these push-ups is giving me flashbacks to my teenage years with my off-day wrestling conditioning coach, an NYC firefighter, who used to crush us with push-ups. Literally, guys used to groan when they'd show up at the wrestling room and see this guy since you knew you were doing every kind of push-up: hands-out, hands-in, diamonds, one-handed, long holding reps at 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 down, until you collapsed. Since all our reps were all synchronized, he could easily spot anyone who was dogging it - using their knees or collapsing their way out of doing all their reps. I've definitely collapsed quite a few times doing these push-ups, which in week 5 call for 6 sets of 25.

On the plus side, it's a pretty quick workout, the length of which is mostly dictated by how many miles I need to run. On light running days, I'm finished in about a half hour, and I'm really starting to look forward to my training days. It's also a pretty portable workout program, so I'll be able to do everything besides pull-ups (my bread and butter) while traveling later on this month.

I've also been allowing myself to indulge with a some more beer and sweets from time to time. I think part of it is that I know I don't need to run calorie deficits for shedding weight like I used to, but I also think that your body just craves more food when you start a new training regimen. So, I stand by my cheapo recommendation of not doing a formal workout routine when your first goal is shedding body fat. It just seems to trick your body into overeating.

I finally unloaded the expensive Garmin watch and just sticking with my Fitbit One. I ended up taking about a $100 haircut on the resale forgetting that buying such expensive things also means you're going to pay a lot of fees trying to sell it again. Oh well. I figure I'm saving so much money anyway that it's ok to play around with different ways to geek out my routine.

Week 5-6
  • Running, Treadmill Running, Treadmill Running
    2/3/4/2 miles, Mon/Tue/Wed/Fri
  • Pushups Pushups Push-up
    6 sets of 25 push-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Sit-Up Sit-Up Sit-Up
    6 sets of 25 sit-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Pullups Pullups Pull-up
    2 sets of 8 pull-ups Mon/Wed/Fri
  • Swim Swim
    Swim continuously for 25 min. 4-5 days/week

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