Click here to read my update for days 1-3 of this challenge.
It’s Saturday! Are we on day 4 already? Wow, where has the time gone? You may (or may not) be surprised – usually on Saturdays I do wushu, but not today! Nope. Why? Because I needed to do my Chloe Ting workout otherwise I’d be disqualified early from my team and I didn’t want to screw up our team score too badly.
But oh man. Today was not a good workout day. I didn’t feel well to begin with (hello Aunt Flo and what’s up headache), but I wanted to be on track to hit the 25% goal so that we can at least get a rank B for the team challenge.
My teammate has been slaying the challenge as per usual (literally the girl doesn’t miss a day) and a few days ago I got the countdown timer saying I needed to complete 25% within 3 days or something. The challenge is 18 days long so that meant I needed to complete day 5 by tomorrow. So that meant no extra rest days for me this week – I had to workout daily to get 25% on time.
…or so I thought.
It’s only after I completed today’s workout that I realised I still had until end of day on Monday to complete Day 5. Gah, I totally could have taken a rest day today as long as I worked out tomorrow and Monday. That said, usually I take Sundays as my rest days, so perhaps this worked out for the best and I’ll take my rest day tomorrow after all. It’s still far better than having zero rest days at all this week so I could keep up, so I’ll take that as a win.
I’m expecting to get disqualified next week but still continuing this challenge at my own pace. We’ll see how it goes!
Days 4–6
7/23 – Day 4: Completed 17:09.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Booty & Legs, 10min Booty.
Videos not completed: Full Body HIIT.
You may have noticed that the Full Body HIIT was not completed today. Jacky exercised with me today. Jacky doesn’t like HIIT (he also has a bad knee). Your girl here also was not about to do a HIIT workout with a raging headache and uterus pain.
In fact, your girl here could barely complete the other two workouts because her head started hurting so much. As such, let’s be pretty proud that I managed to get anything done at all, shall we? Yep, that’s what we’re going with :D
My body was actually pretty sore from the last couple of days and I haven’t felt sore in quite some time, so that was interesting haha. Again I felt like the floor exercises were better than the standing ones for me for the first video. Nothing much else to say for that one except pushing through all the pain haha.
For the second video, I had to take some longer rests because the short ones Chloe gave was not enough for me to recover from close to failure / my head spinning. It didn’t help that she often went from facing up to facing down for the floor exercises. For the final few exercises, I decided to do my own finisher and with hip thrust pulses then abduction pulses instead of the frog pumps and mini rainbows.
I know from doing the video previously that those exercises don’t really help my glutes and only hurt my pelvis. Plus I was very much over turning around again when it exacerbated my headache each time to do so. I really enjoyed the finisher I gave myself, though Jacky said he really enjoyed Chloe’s finishing exercises, which worked out well!
Bleh, today’s workout could have gone a lot better, had it not been for that pesky headache! Jacky and I switched expressions in our usual end-of-workout photo for today haha.
7/25 – Day 5: Completed 12:03.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Core & Arms, Upper Body, Intense Abs Workout, 10min Full Body Cooldown.
Wow, somehow I enjoyed today’s workout a lot more than Day 3’s. I think it’s probably because I’m now at a time of the month where I’m less bloated and feeling much stronger. It could also be that we purchased an expensive massage gun from Costco yesterday since it was majorly on sale, and my muscles felt infinitely better after using it for a solid 30-45min haha.
As with day 3, I went at my own speed and tried to focus on tightening my core, engaging the right muscles and improving my form. This again meant quality over quantity, and lots of extra breaks wherever I needed.
I realised part of where my form was going wrong was the position of my head – I always had a bad case of turtle neck where I extended my neck too far forward and kept looking down during planking moves. Today, finally, I managed to correct my head positioning by looking somewhat ahead, as well as trying to keep my shoulders down, which meant my plank form immediately looked better.
Also, I am so pleased with how my pushup form is progressing. I was able to do proper half-way pushups today with very good form, if I may say so myself. The staggered pushups were tough but I was able to do them decently too. I worked very close to failure for these today, so had to pause and rewind the video for longer rests after those exercises.
Same for the tricep dip exercises – I could literally see my back straighter, core tighter, and I also felt all the energy in my triceps rather than compensating with my legs. My triceps burned in a good way and I’d consider that to be a definite improvement over not being able to feel anything because the muscles are non-existent :’)
I amended some of the ab exercises to make them easier for myself and thus keep all the energy in my weak abs so that I wouldn’t compensate with other muscles. Welp, my abs were certainly burning and I loved it! Today I think I had a solid workout. I still had a little energy to practice my wushu form briefly afterwards as well.
And, as you can see from the list of completed videos, I managed to do my warm up and also a longer cooldown. The cooldown is one of Chloe’s earlier videos, and I’ve previously complained that she doesn’t leave enough time between each stretch.
While that would still ring true for me in general, today was one of those days where I just needed some quick stretches before getting on with my day, and it was actually perfect. Overall, 8/10 difficulty (having the right form makes it harder, shocker!) and 8.5/10 enjoyability.
7/27 – Day 6: Completed 13:03.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Full Body Burn.
Ahhh, a nice short workout, exactly what I needed. Wushu put me in paiiin yesterday. That, and my old bones just don’t want to function like they used to. I decided to take it easier today so that I wouldn’t injure myself (plus I didn’t bother getting my mat out so… there’s that).
Despite having done this workout before, I was not expecting so many ab/plank exercises… gah. Not getting my mat out was a mistake. However, I was too lazy to take my mat out after I’d begun and decided to just power through the first set. I kept my head in a straight line with my back again, and kept my core working as well.
I did, however, amend some of the exercises because I still didn’t want to get my mat out. Lol. So I did some standing ab exercises or practiced some foundational wushu exercises instead. I loved that today was a single video and that I was able to have time and energy to practice my form a couple of times after as well.
So, while I took it easier for the ab exercises, I balanced it out by doing pushup burpees lol. Yep, I added a pushup to both of the burpee exercises. That was fun :p I actually did quite enjoy it, and am pretty impressed. Who is this person who decides to make burpees harder?? Who have I become?
I did my own stretches after. Overall I think today was a great workout. I like the way that I try to push myself where it made sense, but also amended exercises/did the no jumping variation where I felt like I was too tired to engage the right muscles properly so that I wouldn’t compensate and potentially hurt myself.
Finally, I’m glad I recorded myself because – dang – some of my wushu moves suck. I thought I was doing them correctly but I am in pain looking at how sloppy I look.
Anyways! Tomorrow is a rest day (and the start of a new post, though it doesn’t really make sense, I guess?) so catch up with you in a couple of days from now.
Muchos love,