2.5 weeks status report

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays. Baffled? Intrigued? Charmed? Discuss here.
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JackHacket
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2.5 weeks status report

Post by JackHacket » Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:00 pm

Well, I started "shugging" 2.5 weeks ago and haven't missed an N-day so far. I shug only on those N-days where I don't do any other exercise, though. I haven't exercised this regularly since my teens (20 years ago) and I feel great! Kudos to Reinhard for his masterly insight into the human psyche.

My routine has evolved quite a bit already. I started out simply doing the moves shown in the Youtube videos, which were a great help and made it easy to get started. But as I am an avid student of exercise programs (but could never stick to them due to overwhelming time requirements), I figured I'd mix things up a bit.

As I posted elsewhere, I use an SZ-curl bar instead of a sledge to do them and I still do two rounds of shugging minus the Fireman (as I found the trio of FM, Chopping Wood and Chop the Tree a little too redundant) and minus Flip the Lever (which I had to replace as it doesn't work with the curl bar) as an integral part of my workout plan. But I've added other stuff. I will post my routine once it has settled a little and once I manage to squeeze it into 19 minutes a pop. It is currently more like 25, which is still wonderfully short considering there is no commute to the gym etc. 14 minutes seems too short for me as it won't allow targetting all muscle groups. 19 seems another good number to shoot for somehow. Should I fail some N-days at 19, I'll cut back to 14.

One thing I do is perform most of my shugging (all moves which my ceiling height allows) standing on a little rebounder trampoline. This adds a lot of instability, greatly intensifying the core workout and also targetting buttocks, thighs and calves quite substantially. I really, really recommend you try this! (maybe try briefly in a store...)

I'll post my full routine one of these days.

Shug on!

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reinhard
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Post by reinhard » Fri Sep 19, 2008 3:18 pm

Excellent news! Thanks for sharing.

19 minutes sounds very reasonable. It's still tolerably short, and has much of the in-your-face arbitrariness of 14. :-)

But if times get tough, don't begrudge yourself a fallback to 14. Think of them as two lines of trenches in the war against sloth.

Shugging on a trampoline... sounds very fun (any aerial moves? :-)). My only concern would be the increased risk of accidentally clobbering someone (or myself).

Reihard

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