Rest and recovery

Last week was a forced week of recovery. No kettlbells as I was out of town for work and work was CRAZY as it was. Considering in a 60 hour time frame I got about 6 hours of sleep...and not all at once, oye...vey. Not fun. But the day before that chaos started I did get to the gym (sans kettlbells) in a new city and mucked around for a bit. I always hate the first few times you go to a new gym because you just can't *find* anything or the equipment is just a little bit different or you don't quite know how to work something so you end up looking silly for a moment or two.

I did have some 15 year old guy call me beastly because I was doing pushups between my squat sets and apparently he couldn't do that many. I was only on set 2...which is only about 20 pushups...so the comment was kind of funny although don't kids have to go to PE and do pushups on a regular basis? Then some other kid had to help me with the silly power squat rack as I was trying to do deadlifts and didn't realize it was one of those 'high tech' racks where you can just take these pins out and you have a nice place to put the bar so you can actually pull the plates off of the bar when you are done. I was appreciative, but felt silly all the same. Granted I got ten shades of stares between my turkish getups with a dumbell and my free weight lifting (apparently women with the free weights are a rarity). I have learned to just put the eyes down and ignore it...but sometimes it's hard not to fight the stares.

Since I've been focused on kettlbells I haven't been near anything but the kettlbells I have at my house (so much fun to be able to just workout in my living room!)...so I haven't played with a barbell in awhile. I wasn't trying to go for any crazy but was able to pull on my deadlifts @ 205 (93%) of my max (220) at 2 sets of 1 so that is a good sign!

Coming home after no kettbells last week I wondered how I would fare...and it went well. Definitely rested and stronger...did the most Turkish getups to date, did the most 16kg snatches to date, could press the 16kg 1 x on each side a total of 2 full sets before my left arm started to fail and could do it with my right side another 2 times. Sweet! 20kg one arm swings feel more controlled and less crazy.

Back to business!