Personal Learning Challenge – Final Post
Well, this is it! I swear it was just yesterday that I was getting my plan ready on what my routine would look like and how I would achieve the goal of completing a muscle up, and now it has all come to an end. Well, not actually, though. I’ll get to that at the end of my blog post. First, I just wanted to provide a quick little update on my progress from the previous 2 weeks since there was no blog post last week. Beginning with last week, I saw an improvement particularly in my dips and chin ups. I was able to push to 8 dips consistently in every workout, this is something I haven’t been able to do for over 3 months, so it felt amazing. Secondly, I got up to 5 chin ups. It wasn’t just about me getting to 5 chin ups, all 5 felt so much easier than before. So, 2 good things that I noticed, my workout log can be seen here. But then this last week, a close family member of mine passed away. I was with my family or doing school work all week, so I didn’t end up going to the gym at all, not even for my own personal routine. Its an extremely unfortunate thing to happen, and I just couldn’t find the motivation to bring myself to the gym. However, I will now go on and provide a summary of my overall experience, beginning with going week-by-week for the weeks with blog posts, and then ending it off by what worked for me and what did not throughout the weeks as a whole.
Week 1
In my first week, I did a really good job at researching what exercises are required to include in a muscle-up training routine and what a muscle-up actually is in terms of breaking it down into different phases. This allowed me to be organized when putting my routine and overall plan together, and gave it some nice structure. I will admit, I was a little afraid of the challenge just from looking at videos of extremely jacked dudes performing reps on reps of muscle-ups, but at the same time this got me extremely motivated going into week 2.
Week 2
Week 2 was definitely a let down for me as I was really looking forward to getting a good start on my training, but I got extremely sick and only got train 2 times. Even though I did get to the gym twice, those workouts were tough to get through and I put out some very weak numbers. However, during this week I did choose two exercises to implement into my routine: the band pull-apart and the Australian row. Boy am I glad about that because not only are those tough exercises and good to do when training for a muscle-up, I’ve seen improvements in both of them over the weeks. The band pull-apart was especially important to implement because my chiropractor did recommend that exercise for me to do to increase my stability in my shoulders.
Week 3
In week 3, I started to get into the swing of things and felt a lot better than the previous week, but here I began to stumble across the problem of time management between my normal routine and the muscle-up routine, and making sure to not give myself too much time between my training days. This week, in general, made me realize how difficult it is incorporating two separate routines into my week.
Week 4
In week 4, I successfully managed to fulfill my goal of managing my time between my normal routine and my muscle-up routine and was proud of doing that so quickly and efficiently. I also started to see progress in my normal routine (for dumbbell press, shoulder press, back exercises, etc) that were definitely associated with my calisthenics exercises. It was really nice to see this progress and this added some extra motivation for me, as I have been struggling to see real progress for a while.
To summarize things, I’ve realized, especially thinking about this learning challenge this week, that fitness goals take a LONG time to achieve results. Especially with something like a muscle-up, it is an extremely difficult feat to achieve and takes time, lots of time. It is not a race. Especially for someone like me, who at the beginning of training struggled to complete 3 reps of pull-ups and was even surprised I was able to achieve that number. Along with that, my shoulder strength was relatively weak, something that is needed to complete a muscle-up. Some things that worked well for me during my challenge, was utilizing social media and online discussion forums. Through this, I was able to grasp what was needed to be done to achieve my goal, and there were many people that were struggling with the same things as me, so it was nice to know I was not alone. Another thing was being organized and creating a workout log. The log gives me a clear look at how I have progressed. Although, I know that I could clean it up a little bit more. Something that didn’t work well for me initially, was my time management. As previously discussed, my time management wasn’t the best with both of my routines and I had to readjust quickly in order to not sway away too much.
A classmates post that I found particularly meaningful to me was Chloe’s “Brush it off: Week 6” post. This is because she also had a learning challenge that was fitness related, so it was really nice to see how much achieving fitness goals and seeing results means to someone else. It definitely resonates with me and I am familiar with the feeling.
To end things off, I am extremely happy I started this challenge, and there is no way I am done it yet. After I will be done school this coming week, I am hopping right back on the gain train and training to complete a muscle-up. I know what it takes, and I want it to happen.