Hi!

I do weights with my wife on Tuesdays and Saturdays. We normally do classic weight training, but last week she thought it might be fun to do a follow-along “posterior chain” workout from Roxanne Russell (an Australian fitness person on the tubes of you). It was so much “fun” she immediately wanted to do a dumbbell shoulder workout from Caroline Girvan. Caroline was using 8kg weights, I used 5, my wife was on 3. I quite like workouts where you just stick to one weight, it simplifies things. There were of course exercises where I could have gone a lot heavier, but also moments where 5kg felt more than enough.

So my hamstrings are toast and my triceps hate me. But it was fun! So much so that we repeated it (and I moved up a weight or two).

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s no bad thing to cross train, and it’s no bad thing to change things up every now and then. And if I can suffer through it, so can you. It’s honestly a refreshing change not to be making all the training decisions in a session.

Speaking of cross training, I’ve been having a go at “rope flow”, which seems quite fun and useful if you don’t take it too seriously. I cut the sound on this video because there was a lawn mower running nearby, and I was swearing a lot:

​https://vimeo.com/1096945046​

It’s not all suffering through kettlebells and chonky bits of iron. I also ended up shooting a couple of sword videos. This is me getting into a longsword frame of mind:

​https://vimeo.com/1096538105​

And this is a very useful exercise for learning when to pass and when to lunge, with a rapier or any other weapon:

​https://vimeo.com/1096538161​