Click here to read my update for days 1-3 of this challenge.
Click here to read my update for days 4-6 of this challenge.
Click here to read my update for days 7-9 of this challenge.
Click here to read my update for days 10-14 of this challenge.
Alrighty, this post comes later than expected, but better late than never. I ended up so busy and exhausted over the weekend I took a 3hr nap yesterday afternoon and was groggy more or less all day. It was overall a great weekend spent with church friends but my social quota going from 0 to 100 is taking a lot out of me.
This will be the final post for this challenge with my final thoughts at the end. This challenge has taken me far longer than 18 days, but that was to be expected since I was doing it on the days I wasn’t doing wushu. I needed more rest days than I thought I would, but sometimes wushu takes more out of me than expected, and sometimes the workout itself is more intense so I just needed more rest.
I’ve actually really enjoyed doing this challenge alongside my wushu classes. It ensures I get a workout in 4-5x/week, which is ideal for me, and it’s great for helping motivate me to actually do some wushu practice on the days I don’t have class. Since I’m already warmed up, may as well get some practice in, amiright?
I also very much credit my teammate for me getting this far with this challenge. She completed it according to schedule, and even though I’m disqualified from the team, I’m still encouraged to complete the challenge so that it’ll still be added to my profile as a completed team challenge.
I don’t want to quit or stop the challenge and have all that prior hard work go to waste! We’re ranked B because of my teammate, I can’t let her down like this! Here we go for the final 4 days~
Days 15–18
8/15 – Day 15: Completed 17:24.
Videos completed: Core & Arms, Arms & Core.
Look at the time completed and the videos completed and it’s clear I wasn’t feeling it today haha. But I still got it done! It was a very low intensity workout today, which I appreciated. Despite having an entire rest weekend, I still feel like I needed to ease back into it.
Once I started the workout, I did make some degree of effort. I tried to do as many sets of pushups as I could and I think I actually managed to do over 15 pushups in total across the two videos (didn’t always go as low as I wanted, but not bad nonetheless). I didn’t want to do any of the side plank exercises so I substituted some of them for more pushups or just regular planks.
Today was also the first time in a while that I felt strong enough to do renegade rows properly (by that, I mean my hips weren’t shifting from side to side while doing it), and I was able to do a couple of the tricep planks! I also had no trouble with the plank jack shoulder taps.
I’ve been feeling pretty weak lately and have been eating like crap, but this workout was really encouraging. Even though I felt weaker, I can say for certain that I didn’t feel as confident doing these exercises as I did today, yay.
Towards the end of the Arms & Core video, I decided to practice my wushu form instead. In my previous post I thought that I’d be able to finish learning my form on Thursday. I ended up two moves away from finishing the form, but my goodness what I learned was already enough for it to literally be the hardest class I’ve had.
I needed to do 2 kicks followed by a jump kick and a tornado kick. Let me tell you, I did not have the stamina for it. Even if my shifu did want to teach me the last two moves, my brain and body was not going to have any of it. I was 110% winded. No wonder my body needed rest in the following days.
Tomorrow I will aim to finish my form and then take time to improve on it over the week while my stamina improves. I’ll try to do day 16 on Wednesday, but if I can’t, you’ll know the reason why!
8/17 – Day 16: Completed 13:12.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Full Body Burn, Abs in 2 Weeks, 5min Cooldown.
Hello? What’s this? Completed before lunchtime and including a warm up and cooldown? This girl that worked out properly today and was actually excited to do the Full Body Burn video, who is she? Do we even know her? Did I get kidnapped and replaced?
Lolno. I didn’t go to wushu class yesterday. As if that one line explains everything, but it kind of does; I was so exhausted yesterday that I wasn’t able to make it to wushu class. As such, I actually had enough energy today to do a proper, full-on workout.
Apparently I just needed that extra rest day because when I started practicing my form during the first ad break, I was able to do the tornado kick that I struggled so hard with last week. I followed Chloe’s workout for the most part today, though I did switch to practicing form during part of the ab workout because we just couldn’t be bothered with getting our mat out today.
I could literally feel that I was stronger today during my workout. Usually I struggle with the lateral lunges on my left side, and sometimes I hate them so much I just don’t do them altogether, but today I was able to easily get back up from my left side lateral lunges! Like, literally as easily as I get up from the lateral lunges on my right side.
I also added a pushup to every burpee. Honestly I’m so impressed at my pushups now. They aren’t perfect, but the fact that I can do them to a decent depth is worth celebrating in my books. I mean… I got up from this depth… as part of a burpee, I am pretty damn impressed!!
My camera wasn’t angled properly so one of my hands is cut off, but it’s a legit depth. Full pushup. The getting back up part was a little shaky; I’m still working towards getting back up in a perfect straight line, but the fact that I was even able to get back up from a proper pushup? Aw yeah. (This one was obviously my best one though – for half of the pushups I didn’t get down this deep.)
For the ab workout, I amended most of the exercises so that I didn’t need to have my back on the floor. I was either doing them propped up on my elbows or standing up or in a high plank if I wasn’t practicing my wushu form. The 10min passed quite quickly and I appreciated it.
8/20 – Day 17: Completed 08:53.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Legs & Booty, Small Waist & Round Butt (loosely followed).
Look at that time! Completed before 9am? Who is she and when did she replace Bobbie?
Kidding, but also kind of not. I didn’t do my workout yesterday because I was exhausted from wushu on Thursday and just general lack of sleep. I ended up taking another 2hr nap in the afternoon and waking up groggy. It would have been possible for me to complete the workout since it was only 4pm when I’d woken up, but we needed to pack then travel for a weekend trip, and I needed to save all my energy for that.
Today, though, we’re outsiiide! Well, we’re at an Airbnb with our friends for a weekend away to Lake Tahoe, and, despite being away from home and barely sleeping the night before, I still managed to get a workout done. I’d call that a huge win. I worked out in the cool morning air on the patio amongst the trees as the sun was still beginning her ascent. It was lovely.
I didn’t have my mat with me today so only loosely followed the workout videos and omitted any movements that required my back being on the floor. For those movements, I did my usual wushu practice. Today was primarily focused on booty so I was actually able to get most of Chloe’s intended exercises done.
I finished learning my form on Thursday but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. My shifu said my newly learned kicks looked great, but I am not happy with them. I know I can do better, I just don’t have the stamina for it yet. I’ll continue to work hard!
Finally, I was heeeella weak because I started my period. Yep, started period, was in pain and still managed to get a workout/wushu practice in. Are you proud of me? I’m proud of me! Final day of this challenge should be complete on Monday. Woohoo!
8/26 – Day 18: Completed 18:19.
Videos completed: 5min Warm Up, Full Body Burn.
Videos incomplete: Intense Abs Workout, Flat Stomach Abs.
Welp, “should be complete on Monday” turned into Wednesday and now Friday. Gosh, where did the time go this week? Monday we got back from Tahoe and it was already early afternoon. I was knackered and just needed to rest. In fact, the entire theme of this week was I Am Knackered and Need To Rest, including today to be honest.
Tuesday I had another fairly intense wushu class and was a bit too sore and tired on Wednesday to do the workout. I also didn’t want to stress out my body by forcing too much exercise on myself. Overtraining is something I’d quite like to avoid, thank you.
Yesterday I had to wake up extra early and was so busy all day I didn’t eat lunch until after 3pm. After which I was so tired I fell asleep on the couch and took a long afternoon nap. I woke up so tired I wasn’t even able to go to wushu class. Today, I ended up also feeling so tired I took an involuntary afternoon nap and woke up with a headache.
And so, it is in this context that I ended up ‘completing’ the challenge. To be honest, I’m really not interested in completing the two ab workouts, so finishing up with a 20min Full Body Burn feels plenty good enough for me. Plus by the time I was finishing up the full body burn video, my headache was getting so bad I felt like throwing up.
I also managed to injure my left leg at the start of the workout because the shorts I wore were too tight and forced my leg into an awkward angle when I tried to do a side lunge, so I had to be careful when putting pressure on it throughout. All in all, it just wasn’t the best day for a workout, but I didn’t want to delay completing this challenge any longer.
I still managed to include a pushup along with the burpees but wasn’t really able to get much wushu practice in because I wasn’t feeling well. I quite enjoyed this workout as the final workout of this challenge and I think it was fine to complete the challenge with this final 20min workout.
Final Thoughts
Goodness. When did I start this challenge again? 18th July, according to my notes… it’s taken more than a month for me to complete this challenge. That said, we always knew that it would take me longer than 18 days because I was doing only 2-3 days per week depending on my wushu schedule.
I actually managed to complete the first 50% with my teammate, then I slowed down a lot after I got disqualified and she continued on to complete the rest of the challenge on time. I think being a part of a team made a huge difference again, because honestly if I didn’t have the carrot of getting this team challenge on my CT.com profile, I’d have just stopped and quit the challenge already.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: seeing that my teammate completed the challenge and knowing that she got a lower rank because she was willing to accept me getting disqualified was a major part of my motivation to just finally get this challenge complete.
That said, I wonder if I pushed myself too hard at the start of this challenge in order to get the 50% goal completed with her, and ended up overtraining? I feel like I had to start taking extra rest days and skipping wushu classes shortly after because I was just too tired.
My wushu classes are intense enough, plus my work schedule got really busy in the last couple of weeks, so doing 2-3 more workouts on top might have been a bit too much for my body? Especially since wushu is still fairly new to me and my body hasn’t had a proper chance to get used to it yet?
My teammate pointed out that we didn’t get a 2 Week Shred this year, so the Get Abs Challenge is essentially this year’s 2WS, but marginally less intense as we had 3 rest days and only 30-40min of workouts per day. The 2WS has always been harder because it was jam packed with workouts almost every day.
The Get Abs Challenge didn’t feel super intense overall, but it might have been a bit too much for my body to handle without sufficient rest. Now that I think about it, I was essentially doing HIIT 4-5x/week, which was just way too much.
I’m still glad I did it, but moving forward I’ll have to seriously consider how many days of workouts I’ll actually be able to do. Right now I’m thinking maybe just one extra workout a week on Saturday, so I’ll be doing wushu on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then another workout on Saturday, then resting 4x/week?
Chloe’s new challenge launches on Monday and it’s another reps-based challenge like Get Peachy. I definitely wouldn’t mind doing some hypertrophy training! I might actually be able to do more than 1 workout per week if so because hypertrophy is definitely not the same as HIIT and should be a lot more doable.
We shall see!
Muchos love,
