Last week while running with a friend we ran into the instructor of a boot camp session at Memorial Park. We got to talking and he invited us to come join one night, so we decided to do it the next Monday (last night.)
We got there early to do a nice easy warm up run before hand. That went well, we ran the purple loop nice and easy got warmed up. When we got back, the instructor was there setting up. Noticed right off the bat, tires to run with. Sweet! It’s gonna be painful!
We meet the other participants of the session and then we start off with some stretches. After a couple minutes of that, we head straight for the tires, we had to pull the tires about 35-40 years, and swap out with the next person in line at the end. We did that about 5-6 times. Then we moved to carrying a bag of sand, doing the same thing, run the 35-40 yards and pass it off to the next person in line. This is great I thought, good speed work and muscular endurance building. I can handle this quite well.
After that we did sprints to each of the cones he had lined up alone the route, and he would holler out something we had to do. Jumping jacks, planks, knee highs, gorilla jumps, and something else I can’t remember, we would then shuffle back side ways to the beginning and do it all over again, two more times. It was during this that I realized that my shoulder still need work. I couldn’t hold the plank on my left side because it was bothering my shoulder. I need to work on it, rehab the muscle structure and get it strong again.
Next was arm work outs. The instructor handed out pieces of PVC pipe that was filled with something to us all. Then we started doing various exercises like military presses, front and back, 45 degree presses, bench press, tricep raises. All kinds of misery after the first minute of them. Talk about working to muscle fatigue! My shoulder also didn’t like too many of these, but I struggled through them.
Then we moved to push ups which I could not do at all. Between the trashing the arms just took and my bum shoulder, I couldn’t support myself to do pushups, so I did planks instead. Then all kinds of ab crunches, bicycles, scissors, etc. I was totally feeling it before we were done!
And this morning, I have a huge knot in my back from the work out and all my limbs and core are extremely sore. P90X has nothing on this boot camp stuff.
If I can rehab my shoulder up, I may think about doing boot camp over P90X! And if I can muster up the money to do it. It was a great workout and the instructor was awesome. Very military like, but also very attentive to make sure everyone was OK and not doing something that would do more harm than good.
And for now, I sit on the heating pad trying to fix my back and get ready for tonight’s workout…