On Thursday, the four soldiers, in our class of eight, who had not been nailed by the flu or some sort of injury made our way through a strength workout. Us girls, Tessa and I, had Sam as our trainer. We started with some stretches, not static stretches but dynamic stretches, so swinging our legs up as high as we could, and then our arms. We learned that you only do static stretches such as stretching your legs up behind you and your arms across your body after a workout. This is to ensure that all the muscles and joints etc are back in the right place. But to warm up you need to be moving, to warm up the muscles.
We then went on to do strength exercises. We started with squats. One thing I should warn is that I cannot multi-task, so counting and working out did not work. Tessa did all the counting. I think we did 20 squats. Then it was push ups, ladies push-ups, I tried for men’s but Sam likes ladies doing ladies push-ups. We did 40 push ups. Sam wanted to work us to the point that we would call her mean names. She achieved this by Friday morning when I could not lift my arms. After push-ups it was sit-ups time, 3 reps of 12. Ending off with 40 lunges. We then moved into a long cool down of static stretches. Bongani gave us a general workout program to follow and I should make a move on that soon. But for now, Sam you absolute beauty.
Basic strength workout:
Warm up: dynamic stretches - swinging the legs
20 squats
40 push-ups
32 sit-ups
40 lunges
Cool down: static stretches
NB: Perfect form while doing repetitions is more important than the number you can do. Rather do less reps correctly.
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