Sticking to Tabata and GTG for now

6th day of Tabata, working up to primarily sprints with a few cuts, ideally somewhere between 6-11 rounds (24-44 minutes). I am on 2 rounds of sprints, bracketed by 1 round of each of jogging and crunches. Other than that, it’s grease the groove of push presses and not much else. Some yoga type stretches. I feel this is a very minimalistic workout but still intense and challenging and time-efficient and I can ratchet it up in tiny increments as needed. Dropped a few pounds already without really watching the diet too much. A few improvements to nutrition and I should be able to drop a few more pounds, which will help with being able to do the intense sprinting in soccer. After a short 2 month season, my cardio should be good enough to try to do more judo as a summer sport, and add on more dimensions (literally) after adding some Tabata intervals of shrimping or something like that.

 

More tabata

Wife tried crunches for 4 minutes. Low score of 24. No problem. HR=100. Crunches are the wrong exercise for her for this thing.

I tried body weight squats and only mustered 2 minutes, low of 15. Holy moly. I’ll try 3 minutes next time I guess and keep working up. The simplicity of keeping track is nice.

Update: later in the day. Did the body weight squats with the wife for the full 4 minutes. Much more motivating with someone else there. At 2 minutes we thought we were done then got a second wind somehow to push through. Low score for me = 15. For her = 16. Good stuff. I did some standing afterwards and felt perfectly fine. No conflict between the tabata and the zhan zhuang. Night time is also easier for some reason. Next time maybe I can try morning.

 

Tabata vs. zhan zhuang and qigong

I want to try tabata some more after my initial experimentation with it seemed quite promising. However, I’m a bit concerned it could interfere with the goals of zhan zhuang and qigong. My simplistic understanding is that in zhan zhuang, I want to train my nervous system to be as calm and relaxed as possible, then be ready for everything to fire in concert, not necessarily explosively, but everything in between up to explosively – more likely the “continuous” power curve sought through bagua circle walking. Stillness in motion, constant power and movement, for standup or ground game.

Related to that I think part of qigong’s benefit as well as prerequisite is calming the nervous system. After doing tabata, everything was fired up. The HR stays up for a while. The hormonal effects seem at opposite extremes in these exercises. I imagine that getting better control over the gas/brake pedals between “fight or flight” responses and “rest and digest” responses is important. You want to be as relaxed as possible, “listening”, nothing firing, then be ready for sudden action/reaction.

To resolve or minimize this possible conflict, if it exists (maybe only for a beginner or someone more interested in zhan zhuang and qigong), I hope I can just do both extremes and balance them by doing relatively more qigong and zhan zhuang – it is so much more difficult to get some conscious mind/body regulation of a calming effect and “song” than a stress response effect – anyone can stress themselves out just by thinking stressful thoughts within seconds or minutes with no special training whereas probably no one can meditate or calm the system to the same magnitude with zero, or even significant, training. Probably need a ratio of something like 10:1.

Also, I think at first I might try only functional whole body exercises, such as bridging or snaking or rolling over, maybe squatting, and avoid too much nervous system firing localized to one small muscle group that would interfere with training the whole body connections, or add no particular functional training. The “muscle memory” from just 4 minutes of work seems so strong it could easily override all that other work that I’m not particularly good at. That would be bad to undo anything that takes much more effort (at least measured in time, not calories expended) to build up. But it should be fine if it’s all functional stuff, and only a few times per week. Plus, the promise of simultaneous anaerobic/aerobic training and fat-burning with such incredible efficiency and low time investment is too compelling not to figure out how to add this method.

 

Tabata experimentation

I don’t fully understand Tabata but if you give me the infomercial explanation “14 minute abs” I can maybe follow it. I tried experimenting by doing 3 intervals of running in place (didn’t sprint as I did this in the kitchen in front of the only timer I have), 1 interval of squatting. No counting of reps, not really sure if I did any of it totally correctly. Thought I should only do 4 intervals as an initial experiment. A few minutes later I thought I’d try crunches. Tried 4 intervals and the last 2 were tough. Hmm. Will have to try it again. Not sure how it’s different from other interval training except that the ratio of work to rest is higher. I’m assuming people always use a timer. I’ll need to get a timer. I like the idea of getting both anaerobic and aerobic fitness fast. Something tells me this is counterproductive to qigong but 4 minutes total time seems so low, albeit at high intensity, that overall it seems fine, considering I want to ratchet up my qigong and zhan zhuang to well above that. Everything else I like to do could be considered a warm up or cool down. I really am attracted to the notion of high intensity as much more efficient, mostly the efficiency (read: laziness). More work, better outcome, less time – awesome.