My Hard-Ish 75 Update… 2

You know what, I owe you all an apology – I said I’d update this every week, but I haven’t. I’ve carried on doing the training, the reading etc etc, but I’ve had a boat load of work on and as a result, I haven’t managed to keep up with the hard-ish 75 updates.

I was sat on Flag Beach in Fuerteventura when a message from one of my Instagram followers messaged me asking if I was still doing the challenge because he hadn’t seen a hard-ish 75 update. Shame on me – I’d been crap at updating. I forget that 30-odd thousand people read this fitness blog every month, so I have a duty to keep the content fresh! I owe you all a hard-ish 75 update.

Here’s the update by way of what I’ve been doing across the exercise, food and reading point of view. I’ve also thrown in a little section on what I’ve learned so far…

Hard-Ish 75 Exercise

The hard-ish 75 exercise has been an interesting mixture. A problematic neck reared its ugly head in week 3 and stuck around for a fortnight or so. I got the injury doing some clean and jerks (the usual culprit), then had some treatment on it. The treatment helped, but then I did a bodybuilding-style workout and the back exercise triggered the injury again, rendering my week 4 a difficult one.

I still trained – I upped the cardio (I even did my first spin class since 2011!), played football and did a lot of leg training, so it worked out well in the end.

My neck cleared up, then a snatch session where I was repeating movement patterns aggravated the problem. Back to the physio, back to the acupuncture table and back to adapting my workouts. Since the injury cleared up I’ve been absolutely fine – I had a couple of great weeks training ahead of the Active Retreat where I am currently writing to you from.

Lessons learned – you can still train even when injured. You just have to be sensible about it.

Here’s the kind of workouts I’ve been doing – mixture of weightlifting, circuits, cardio and sport. I’ve also added an image of my acupuncture treatment as well…

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Hard-Ish 75 Food Update

My food intake has generally been pretty good – I hadn’t fasted as I should and I’ve had a couple of social engagements, but that was part of the reason this was a hard-ish 75 rather than the brutal version. I’m not a robot and have no desire to live like one.

Generally speaking, the food has been along the usual lines – skip breakfast, light lunch and more calories in the evening. I’m going to re-start some food prepping efforts when I get home from Fuerteventura, because I think that can be a really helpful food tool and it saves time in the week.

I’m going to endeavour to drink more smoothies too – I want to avoid the dreaded winter cold if I can, and eating plenty of vitamins and minerals is always helpful on that front.

Lesson learned: Make life easy for yourself. Prep if you can, because it’s another job you can avoid at a later date.

Hard-Ish 75 Reading Update

I have to confess I have missed a few days of reading recently, but in my defence (not an excuse, I have to correct it) I have been up til gone 1.30am working for a few nights in a row. As you could imagine, reading my 10 pages after that is about as appealing as a snot sandwich, so I’ve avoided it. In the days afterwards I’ve played a (sort of) catch up, where I’ve read more than I needed to, but I suspect I haven’t done enough. I’ve got to improve this.

Lesson learned: Keep a tab on what you’ve missed, so you can make sure you catch up to where you should be. It’s easy to let this slip.

Unexpected benefits…

My friends I’ve been doing this with have enjoyed the effects on themselves, so it got us kicking around a few ideas about how we can bring this ‘movement’ to move people. I like the idea of making it an accessible version that more people can get involved with, rather than an impossible target that nobody can achieve.

There’s a few ways we can do this, so watch this space. It’s certainly not priority number one right now, but it’s something I’d like to explore more in the near future. I’m getting a lot out of this and I’m sure others would too.

As I mentioned, I’m currently running my Active Retreat in Fuerteventura, so I’ve had a little bit more brain space and it has helped me generate more ideas, more content thinking and more ways I can generate a helpful message to others.

Next hard-fish 75 update coming soon. By the way, here’s the start of the challenge and here’s the update I did after week one.

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