Jillian Cardazone

Workout date: 2/21/15

Saturday marked the end of our 5-week Nutrition Challenge at the gym.  Dieting has never been a strength of mine.  Well, I suppose if I ate decently on a day-to-day basis, then dieting would not seem so difficult to me.  As I've gotten older, I've tried to eat better, but I still visit Chick-Fil-A more than most people.  What I do have going for me is willpower.  Challenge me to do something for 5 weeks that I normally would not do and I am intrigued.  Throw in a gambling component and I'm sold.

So what were my takeaways from the Nutrition Challenge?

• The Zone diet is very difficult if you don't cook.  And I don't cook all that much.
• There is not nearly enough fat in my regular diet.
• Until this diet, I thought point #2 was a good thing.
• My meals need to be more balanced.
• The before and after photos showed my back now has more definition.
• They also showed that my boobs are lopsided.
• I should keep my shirt on.

In general, I would say the diet was a success.  I lost 5 pounds overall, but I lost 10 pounds of body fat.  I feel leaner.  Not sure I can say there was a change in my energy, but that is tough to gauge because work has been crazy lately.  My suspicion is that this diet will change my eating habits for the better, but I probably will never do this diet as strictly as I have over the last 5 weeks.

The baseline workout and measurements were supposed to take place at 9am, but Aimee did her best Giulia impression by sending a text earlier in the week about coming to Competitors Class at 7am.  I was more zombie-like than normal, so I didn't get to the gym until 7:15.  Luckily, no one had begun working out yet.  In fact, we decided to do our measurements before working out.  Then we did a warmup consisting of 3 rounds of a minute on the Airdyne followed by 15 med ball cleans.  For a warmup, this sure did feel painful.  Probably not a good sign since med ball cleans were in the baseline workout.  In fact, we decided to skip the Olympic lifting we were going to do and did the baseline workout next.  I had gotten through 3 full rounds and 6 burpees last time, but I feel like I've gotten better with these sprint workouts recently, so my goal was to approach 4 full rounds.  (As a reminder: the baseline workout was a 10 minute AMRAP of 9 burpees, 15 med ball cleans, and 21 push presses - 95 pounds for guys, 65 pounds for ladies)

The first thing I discovered as we went through round 1 was how much heavier the push presses felt.  I had made my way through them pretty quickly five weeks ago, but I was definitely a bit slower this time around, even if I strung them all in the first round.  Like last time, I finished the first round in about 2 minutes.  In round 2, I kept a good pace through the burpees, split up the med ball cleans but went quickly, then split up the push presses into 3 sets.  Round 2 was done, but the clock was nearing 5 minutes.  If my second round took close to 3 minutes, 4 rounds was not going to happen.  I tried to push hard, knowing if I didn't get moving, my score would not be much of an improvement on last time.  The third round of burpees were slower, but I was still doing actual burpees rather than my routine of "kneeling down, dropping my chest to the ground, then crawling and standing up" that I do when I'm really tired.  Med ball cleans hurt, push presses hurt, but I got through round 3.  A little over a minute to go.

Now the goal was to get to the med ball cleans.  I threw myself at the ground trying to get all 9 burpees done in a minute.  I wasn't moving that fast, but I was moving nonetheless.  As I finished the last burpee and grabbed my med ball I saw I had 10 seconds left.  I managed 3 med ball cleans to finish with a score of 147, six reps better than last time.  Not exactly as much improvement as I hoped for, but it was progress.

Once again I was drained for the front squat and once again I needed several minutes to recover.  I wanted 255 before I did the AMRAP, but now I wasn't sure how much I could get.  I did 135, then 185, then 225.  225 felt heavy because my legs were pretty far gone.  Having done 235 in my first test, I went for 245 next.  It was very shaky, but I did manage to get it up.  There was about two minutes left when I got ready for 255 and I thought maybe I could do one more lift if I was successful with this one.  But I couldn't summon the intensity I usually bring when doing a heavy front squat.  I actually had to step away from the bar after doing my setup because it felt so flimsy.  I took a minute to regroup and made 255 my last lift.  I tried to stay tight, but I could feel everything get shaky and I didn't manage to get up very far before needing to bail.  245 would have to be my score.

The best part of the day, though, was getting to see the other people in the challenge do their workout and hear their results.  I tried my best with this challenge, but some people really killed it.  Flounder didn't want to do 225 for his final front squat attempt, but we hollered at him until he put it on the bar, and naturally he was successful.  Same deal with Mr. Intensity, who failed his first attempt at 225, but then was triumphant the second time around.  Jen Solt managed to go from 65 to 125 on her front squat in 5 weeks.

But no one really came close to the performance that Jill C. came up with.  She lost 8 pounds, but her body fat percentage dropped over 50%!  Then she came in and went from 115 reps in the AMRAP workout 5 weeks ago and slapped on another 32 reps to tie me at 147.  (Note: if she got 148, I may have stopped talking to her).  Her front squat try at 175 was the only thing she failed at, meaning that her front squat of 165 at the end was a 5 pound decrease from her initial results.  That sounds like a bit of a bummer until you consider that she set a 20 pound PR on her front squat the first time around.  So to recap, she was first in 1 category, second in 2 others, and the category she did badly in resulted in a 20 pound PR.  Sounds like a winner to me.  (I finished in a tie for 14th.)

With the Nutrition Challenge over, it is time to focus on the Open.  First announcement is on Thursday night.  I'll be blogging about the upcoming team competition as well as the bet with Rachel.  But first, one more blog post that probably should have been made back when I started this thing.