I spent an hour being tortured by a Swedish deep tissue masseur last night. There is a small massage practice right across the street from the hospital where I work, and I've had massages there before. But, to be honest, the owner is fairly gentle in her technique, and while the massages have been relaxing, I'm not sure they really helped with hot spots. But, the owner recently hired a deep tissue massage specialist and she suggested that I see him. Last night, the masseur kept murmuring out loud when he found a spot that was "interesting". He would then proceed to work on that spot until he was satisfied or I begged for mercy.
I was planning to lift after the massage, but instead decided to just take a rest day and lift this morning. I looked at my training logs this morning, and my last complete rest day was Christmas Day. I had a couple days where I only skied and didn't ski very hard, but I had either run, lifted or skied each of the prior 31 days until yesterday. That might explain my recent comments about being tired.
This morning, I started the 4th week of the current 9-week lifting cycle I'm doing. Each workout starts with a dynamic movement where I'm gradually increasing the weight and number of sets and decreasing the reps. This morning, I dropped to 4x4 (from 3x5) of dumbbell snatches to start the workout. After that, most of my sets were 2x20 with short rest intervals. To do all 20 reps without a rest requires using very low weights. For incline bench presses, I used about 50% of my 1-rep max. For squats, I used about 40% of my 1-rep max.
Tonight, I'm going to try a road run after work. The days are getting longer and I think I can get in at least 30 minutes on the roads before I'll need to turn on my flashlight. My plan is to run for an hour, so I'll wear a reflective vest and blinking lights so I'm visible in the later part of my run.
Late tonight, a winter storm warning goes into effect. We are expecting 7"-14" of new snow by the time the storm is finished. I'm planning a snowshoe run tomorrow morning and my evening workout tomorrow will probably be clearing the driveway.
2 comments:
I don't think you can count a rest day if you had that torture massage. It would be interesting to see your heart rate during that.
Never had one, but heard all good things. Hope you get positive results.
No HRM during the massage, but I'm sure it spiked at times.
It's the closest I'm going to get to a rest day for a while, so I'm counting it. I had my physical today and mentioned to my doc that I'd gone since Christmas without a rest day, to which he replied "It's no wonder you're exhausted."
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