Week 1 - Tuesday 29 Jul – Lifting & uphill sprint

Al had shared with me a routine on YouTube from a Galway trainer called Pat Divilly. He’s always collecting these training gurus and seems to have a new one every week that he proclaims the best. It does have the advantage of gathering new ideas for sessions and the overall advice is usually consistent regardless of the messiah who is prophesying.

This routine caught our eye and we had practised a sample of it at the end of a session to see if it was feasible. It seemed nice and tough so we said we’d try it out properly but then I signed up for H&B. It consists of an Olympic bar with low weights. You start with 8 deadlifts, then without dropping the bar you're straight into 8 barbell rows, 8 clean, 8 shoulder presses and 8 barbell squats. Repeat this for 8 sets.

I really wanted to incorporate it as it fit the overall mantra of attack the body. However I wanted to wrap it into the other two pillars of me strategy, add about 25% toughness to the normal routine and escalate each week.  To that end I said to Alan you can do it as normal but when I hand the bar to you I’m going to run out to the treadmill and pound it at a high incline for a minute at the fastest pace I can. To his lasting credit Alan wanted a piece of that, not that there was any doubt in me mind he could possibly resist the opportunity to push himself farther.

It went great at first, we had 10 Kg plates on each side so 40 Kg including the bar. We could lift more easily but we knew the point in the routine is it would get really tough after the 3rd set. As it happens we chose the weight correctly, any more and we wouldn’t have been able to finish.

As we were running past each other between weight room and cardio room, shouting increasingly breathless encouragement when we could, we discovered a serendipitous feature of the treadmills that probably saved us from meltdown. 

As we hopped on the treadmill and started it each time we were at first annoyed to find it didn’t save it’s incline setting. So we’d have to wait up to a minute for it to raise up again. We stopped being annoyed when we realised we really needed that minute as rest time or we would die.

People in the gym started to notice the furious activity going on where we were but to be honest, we’re regulars and most people assumed, quite correctly, those two feckin' eejits are trying out a new punishment routine again.

We got through it anyway and we were wrecked at the end of it so mission accomplished. The only problem is next Tuesday the weight goes up by 2.5 kg, the incline gets raised and ten seconds get added to the sprint, yikes!! I

’ll admit I was slightly gratified when Al called me a nut and left me to me core Tabata session.