Dear Diary: March 2016

As I sat down to think back over March I realised I couldn’t really remember what on earth I’d done this month. I had to go fetch my diary and review all my assorted apps to remind myself what I’d actually been doing.

I know I got a new fitness watch to try, which I will be reviewing soon, played a couple of Roller Derby games with the Norfolk Brawds, a closed door game against the Dolly Rockit Rollers which we won and an open door game (that was technically in April, but before I wrote this post) against the Newcastle Whippin’ Hinnies, which we lost, as well as a Sur5al tournament in which my team the Blockwork Oranges came third.

I guess that’s quite a lot really! Looking back over my diary I remember I was quite ill at the beginning of the month, and took a few days off which set me back a little, but overall March has been pretty good!

March Achievements

When I set myself my monthly goals back at the beginning of the month I was aiming to run the Trowse 10k quicker than last years time of 1 hour 3 minutes 50 seconds. Despite failing to adhere to all my process goals, which I now realise I didn’t think through as I just don’t have that much time in my week, I smashed this time coming in at 1 hour and 49 seconds. So yay me.

As for my other monthly goals, well I haven’t yet had chance to retake my fitness test, and as for meal planning, well lets just let that one slide shall we. It was Easter, after all.

In March I started working on introducing Plyometrics into my training twice a week. One day doing sets of unweighted skater strides, jump lunges and lateral hops and the other less reps with added weight of frog jumps and ravers in a bid to improve speed and acceleration. I can’t tell you yet whether I’ve noticed any improvement, but they certainly make bits of me ache!

Another March achievement was managing 130kg on pin squats at the gym, not as deep as full squats, but the fact I can even stand up with that weight on my shoulders feels like an achievement as far as I’m concerned.

April Goals

So, the important bit. What do I want to achieve in April? At the moment I’m looking at an upcoming weekend that contains THREE Roller Derby games, so I’m just hoping to survive past the first week, but after that things should quieten down a little and I have some time to work on things.

At the moment my focus isn’t so much on increasing strength as maintaining what I’ve built so far and improving my explosive strength and flexibility and range of motion.

Improve my jump length

I have just extremely unscientifically measured this at approx 150cm, but tomorrow I plan to take a tape measure to the gym with me and measure it properly as I may have been hampered by fear of diving head first into a wall in my tiny house. Once I’ve measured this, I plan to try and  add another 3cm in April. I actually have no idea whether that’s achievable or not. Is 3cm a lot, or not much at all? regardless, its measurable so lets go with it!

• Keep up the plyometrics and add an extra set every other week.
• work on my balance for 10 minutes a couple of times a week, I have several wobble boards from when I sprained my ankle, so it shouldn’t be hard!
• Replace the overhead press in my 5×5 routine with a push press.

Improve my flexibility

I found this guide to assessing your flexibility, which seems a good place to start! I can touch my toes, no problem, but I can’t get my knee on the table, meaning my hips are tight. I can *just* get my wrists on the floor while lying flat, but my shoulders and upper arms don’t touch and round inwards, so some work on that would be good too!

• 15 minutes of Yoga 3 x week – 1 hip opener, 1 shoulder opener, 1 general
• I have a couple of shoulder and hip stretches a physio gave me I’ll do twice a day

Honestly I think that’ll do me for April. I want to focus a lot on training with my team for some tough upcoming games. I’ve struggled with setting myself goals for Roller Derby other than “get better at stuff” as I find them hard to measure, but I’m working on staying lower and more stable, and doing stuff faster and those 2 goals above should help a lot with that!