About my Challenge

 My challenge is to do a 35km Bike ride and 15 push ups in under an hour. I plan to do my challenge on the 24th of October at World Gym during our Wednesday session. For this challenge i will be using my aerobic energy systens and will be training this throughout. The reasons for doing this goal is that I had started the semester with a knee injury from May, I had just started to go to physio and was told that I was not allowed to do any rowing, running, squats or lunges. This left me few options that  was willing to do. I knew that cycling was good for your knee as my dad had recently had a knee replacment and was told to go out cycling to help with the recovery process. The only problem with just doing a bike ride was that I wasn't going to be working on my whole body and that each session I was going to be putting pressure on my legs. Therefore I then added another component, Push ups, which would mean that I would have to build up the strength in my arms and core. Another reason for doing this challenge was that i wanted to get back out on the bike with my dad who is a great inspiration for me. About 2 years ago my dad had a serious heart attack while I was with him at home. He was rushed into Timaru hospital and then flown to Christchurch where he had 4 stents put into his heart. One of his arteries was 97% block and it was amazing that he hadn't gone into cardiac arrest earlier. That same day my dad was meant to me going into the hospital for an ECG but didnt make it there because he had serious chest pains. The most shocking thing about this whole story was that I would have classified my dad as the fittest person in my family. I just shows you that these things can happen to anyone. I cherish my time with my dad so much more and really wanted to do this challenge so that we could enjoy doing something physical togetgher. Below is some pictures of my dad cycling and being such an inspiration :D

Exercise Programme

Below is my exercise programme stating what i had planned to do each day and what i really did. It also contains Time, RPE and loading which is calculated each week. This programme was based on the amount of seesions of each method of training.

Components of Fitness

                                                   

 Above are the 7 methods of training that i choose to help me with my challenge. These are Cardio, Muscular Stength, muscular endurance, speed, power, flexibility and balance. In the table above you can see each week of my programme. I have put in the number of times per week that I plan to work on this component of fitness and this has then been applied to my exercise programme. Cardio is needed for majority of my challenge as my challenge is going to be longer than 10 minutes and requires the aerobic energy system. Flexibility is needed in most challenges but particulary for me personally I need to include it for recovery purposes especially for my knee injury. Muscular Strength, Muscular endurance and power will be worked on through out the 11 weeks as these will be key factors to get me through the challenge and to help me make it to the 100% of effort that i have for both the press ups and the cycling. Balance is just something that can be worked on through out and will help me with the press ups by keeping me steady on the way down and the way up. The last component that I plan to use is speed, I plan to train this by doing 5km as fast as i can go then 2km slow or something similar. At the same time I will slowly increase the distance over time.

Results of Inital Assessment

What happened?? The first 1-5 weeks...

Many things happend in the first 5 weeks that had both good and bad results.


To start off with my first few sessions on the bikei got a really sore bum from riding without bike shorts when I did rides that lasted over half an hour. around about week four I finally pitched in and got myself some bike shorts off trademe and they have been great ever since. Anotherthing that helped me throughout the first five weeks of my challeng was getting 3 full body massages for free from Aoraki Polytechnic. These really helped to relax me and destress me from the week. In addition to these massages I was also getting physio treatment for my knee injury and had plenty of exercises that were beneficial to me in my training.

        

     During the time I had a lot of fun with some of the training. One example of this was using my swiss ball when studying, either when i was sitting at my desk or lying on it to read through some notes. Another example is when I was doing Band fit I felt like i was doing a work out back in the 90's :D.  

       Another aspect that made this experince a whole lot better was doing the weights sessions with Kaitlyn and Megan. This gave me more challenging as i was competing with them and they gave lots of encouragment when it was a hard workout. Working with others also helped when we started using the application Gymboss. this meant that we could do timed sets and rests instead of counting each repition. It also meant that we were working out for longer than we were resting and was helping with our aerobic threshold.  We also made Monday sessions our body weights sessions and Wednesdays we used the machine weights at World gym. An example of some of our body weights sessions was doing prone holds. We would do this by going up for 10 seconds then down for 30 seconds, up for 20 seconds then down for 30 seconds, up for 30 seconds then down for 30 seconds and so on.

Finally, through out these 5 weeks I went home to Tiamru and went for a walk along the bay and had fun in the water. It was so nice to get out in the sun and have fun while also getting a little bit of activity in my day. I also went for a weekend to Wanaka we went for a walk around the lake and in the bush this was a lot of fun.

Me at Caroline Bay Timaru

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Caroline Bay, Timaru

 

 

Some friends and I at Lake Wakatipu, Wanaka

Results of Mid-way Assessment

What happened?? weeks 6-11...

From week 6 onwards I became bored of exercising so I Had to change things up and add new and exciting activities into my plan.

The Wednesday weights sessions got changed and became more spcefic e.g. just legs or arms. The number of sets was also extended to help build the intensity of the session. Another thing that I did  to build the intensity was, after being cleared from the physio, was doing some rowing with Kaitlyn, we did a 20 minute row and then raced each other on the last min which made it more competitive. After one of the gym sessions we went to Moana Pool for a swim which gave us something to look forward to while working out, Motivation J
 








Some other things that I did around Dunedin was going to Kavanagh College. This was for the paper Promoting health and wellness and we played some games with the year 7 students to get them active this also meant that we were involved and allowed us to get some physical activity at the same time. Another thing that I did was veiwing some flats. When looking at some of them there were many steps involved to get to the the flat. So while there I ran up and down the stairs and added this into my programme.

Year 7's @ Kavanagh playing some games.

Sports with Kavanagh College Year 7's

Within these last 6 weeks I went home for the holidays and found this quite a struggle to keep up with my prgramme as I didn't have the facilities like I do in Dunedin. While I was home I was working at the local rest home and it involved a lot of walkin and a bit of lifting. I was also involved with a local production which involved a dance scene so there were many hours spent learning this routine. The other thing that I did when I was home was looking after my cousins. So I decided to add a physical aspect to this and to them to the local park and we played some frisbee and rugby with each other.