Second Program: Week #15 (Last week)

Week 61: Second Program - week 15 out of 15

Week settings:

• Area of focus: Cardio-Strength
• Number of training days: 4
• Limitations: none
• Last week feedback: "Hard, but ok"

Training:

• Monday: 100 OH Pushups (12:34* -First time) +Metis standard x3 (17:59* -PB)
• Tuesday: Hades standard (17:55*) +[Bonus: 50 Leg Levers (01:31* -PB)] +[Bonus: 50 situps (01:25* -PB)]
• Wednesday: Metis standard x3 (19:13*) +[Bonus: 100 situps (03:16* -First time)] +[Bonus: 25 pullups (02:03* -Strict)] +[Bonus: 25 pushups (00:36*)]
• Thursday: boxing training
• Friday: [Bonus: 100 jumping jacks (01:10*) +[Bonus: 50 climbers (00:31* -First time) +[Bonus: 25 pushups (00:36*)] +Kentauros strength 5/6 (25:05 -First time; no star see comments below)

Statistics:

• 4'110 points
• 92 minutes

Ever since Hell Week caught me by surprise in week 13, I have been wondering if I would receive a second Hell Week for my last week of Coach subscription. In the end, I was assigned a perfectly regular trainign schedule (note: since then I finally got an explanation on the way Hell Weeks are assigned, which I'll share in a separate post).


Regular readers know that while I couldn't care less about how many points I have scored since starting Freeletics, I did find a rough correlation between the number of points assigned to workouts and the number of calories burnt. Hence I tend to view total points per week as a proxy to roughly quantify the amount of efforts that a given week required.
When reviewing my weekly statistics, I immediately noticed a decent number of points (>4'000) combined with a fairly short active training time (~22.5 minutes per session). It confirmed my gut feeling that the week had been fairly intense (packed with short workouts but that often left me breathless).


Day 1 - Starting the week with One-hand pushups. This is a novelty. While I had unlocked this workout in the advanced skills sections from the beginning, the coach had never assigned to me stand alone OH pushups (and I believe only once as part of a Zeus early in the program). So it had been a while since I last performed this exercise. It's a good one. I should try to do it more often to improve my performance on regular pushups.
The real challenge of the day was the triple Metis (standard version thankfully!). It wiped me out, but not before I improved my PB by 01:36. Burpees were tough (probably due to prior OH PU), but that was offset by a good pace on jumps & climbers (thanks Iris!)


Day 2 - Good old Hades. I'm still ~01:45 above my elusive 8 months old PB, but I felt good and recorded my best performance of these past 2-3 months (~2 minutes below my usual time).
Training time under 20 minutes felt like cheating. So I threw in a couple of extra abs exercises, as this muscle group had not really been challenged today.


Day 3 - I could copy/paste my comments from day 1 & 2:
Triple standard Metis turned me into a puddle of sweat. I was so brain dead toward the end, that I completed 13 burpees in the last round instead of 10...
Anyway, I still felt bad about training less than 20 minutes so I added a few extra workouts (abs and shoulders, as Metis is pretty light on upper body).


Day 4 - I started with extra exercises to warm-up. It's something that I rarely do, as I don't want to get carried away and end-up burning myself before actually starting the bigger workouts. I don't know if that's because of this warm-up or it was just a bad day but the 5/6 Kentauros strength was difficult to go through. My brain was so eager to put an end to my misery that I ended-up miscounting and stopped the workout after 4 rounds instead of 5. I only realized my mistake several minutes after saving the results. To make-up for the lost round, I performed the last round as a stand-alone, in roughly 7 minutes.
I did complete it the entire workout in its most difficult form, but I didn't to want record a distorted performance (taking a break and stopping the timer, even involuntarily, is major deviation from the normal workout).  Hence I count this iteration as a no star (no-star workouts are always ranked as inferior to star workouts, no matter of total completion time, so it won't affect my PB stats).

That was my last workout of this second 15 weeks journey, and I finished the program with mixed feelings.
On one hand I was a bit disappointed by the last week. I much prefer when the program ends with a Hell Week (it's like in video games: you need an epic fight against the end of level boss to feel like you've accomplished something). Finishing on a regular week felt was anticlimactic. On top of this, I managed to make this stupid blunder when recording my very last workout, finishing on a negative note. I wasn't in a very good mood.

However, a couple days later, stepping back and considering the full 15 weeks, I found that going through the program again was a very positive experience. My fear was that starting all over again would give a "been there, done that" vibe to the entire affair. But that didn't happen. There were enough novelties to keep me interested and challenged. More importantly I kept learning, and some of the toughest workouts I went through helped me reevaluate how I should train on my own once the subscription ends.


My first intention was to conclude by talking a bit further about what I liked/disliked in the new program. But as I started putting down my thoughts, I realized that this was a topic in itself and  and deserved a proper review. So I'll keep this post short and stop here for today.