Counting

I learnt to count a long long time ago.

One….two….three…..four……five…….six……seven…….eight…….nine……ten….

See.  I can do it.  I can keep going past ten too, all the way up – I’d like to think I could probably count forever, but I know I can definitely count to at least 30 because I’ve just done it.

However, when I get into the gym and start a weights session I appear to lose my ability to do this fairly simple task.  Every set of weights that I do I seem to lose count.  Now, when I’m with my PT it isn’t such a big deal (she can count) so I don’t have to worry but when I’m on my own I encounter problems.  There is one particular exercise – it’s a squat but split legs – so you have one foot planted then step forward with the other foot and bend down, then you take the same foot back and squat down and do that 10 times on each leg.  So, to count you have to count each number twice – that really is SERIOUSLY complicated.  Needless to say I quite often end up doing rather more repetitions than I strictly speaking should!  It occured to me today, whilst doing said exercise that I could just count to 20 instead of saying each number twice.  So I tried that.  Unfortunately my stupid brain decided that was silly and I went:

‘one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven, eight, eight, nine, nine, bollocks, that’s not right – um – where am I?  ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen, crap crap crap done it again’ 

Quite a lot.  Well, 3 times to be precise as that is the number of sets of that particular exercise I have to do.

I think that one of the reasons that I kept losing count during my weights session today is that I was practising my ‘game’ face.  My dear friend Mr Lumpy Badger wrote about one of the differences between elite athletes and us being the contortions that we make with our faces whilst exercises compared to the zen-like calm the elite athletes withdraw too.  I decided today to try and get the ‘zen’ face whilst exercising and to stop pulling grunty contortionist faces.  Not as easy as it sounds people.  Not as easy as it sounds.  And it made me lose count.  Again.

Elite athlete serene face:                                                                Grunty contorted face:

It seems a good moment to reflect on the week gone by.  The first week of 2011 has been a good one exercise wise.  Thank you Janathon for giving me the motivation to haul my ass out of bed (apart from on Thursday), and for instilling a bit of drive to my exercise.  I’m hoping that as the month progresses this exercise business will just become habit and I won’t even think about it – a bit like the way I can eat a bag of Maltesers without noticing.  I did a bit of googling on habit formation as I’d heard somewhere about it taking 3 weeks to form a habit – turns out it might take a bit longer than that, but then January is a bit longer than that   It is quite an interesting article.  So, in summary, week 1 has been good.  I have enjoyed the exercise, I have been remembering to focus on the old post exercise high to help re-programme my silly head, I have loved reading the other blogs and I have really liked the feeling of being part of this online exercising community.  Go Janathon!  Here’s to week 2

Janathon Day 8 – 1, 2, skip a few, 99, 100

• Number of enormous chinese meals still sitting slightly uncomfortably in my belly:  1
• Number of weights sessions completed: 1
• Amount of work being done on a Saturday:  too much
• Amount of running around:  1 mile warm up in 9 minutes 32 seconds (faster than last time)
• Overall day rating:  4/5