7WP, Deload - d1
Sunday - 19 February 2023
Workout: Insurance swings, 0850-0910 (20 minutes)
5 rounds of:
KB swing - 28 kg - 10-15-25-50 reps
Time: 17:02
Still fasted. And still short on time, so I’ll update this post later—this will have to suffice for now:
Edit: Yep—25,000 swings in the first 50 days of 2023. Awesome!
Here’s how it went down:
- Days 1-32 - 500 swings
- Day 33 - 0 swings
- Days 34-48 - 500 swings
- Days 49-50 - 1000 swings
My original goal, which I set on New Year’s Day when Frankenbuilding began, was 500 swings every day for the entire 6-week run. My intent was to use the swings to help drive my appetite during the back half of the gaining phase I was in—I had already been gaining since the end of October 2022, and putting away the kind of food I was putting away was getting tedious. I had thought about revisiting one or more daily front squat tabatas (as I had done during BBB in the early part of 2022), but I “enjoyed” running the 10K Swing Challenge over the course of 12 days earlier in the fall, so I figured I’d give daily swings a try.
They certainly didn’t hurt in that regard—I did them in the late afternoon or early evening, more or less right before dinner—and I was usually ravenous once they were done. In the end, though, I’m not sure if it was daily swings or the 10-minute WOD-style workouts that I had been tagging onto the end of the afternoon work on lifting days that was really driving my appetite. Doesn’t matter too much, though: I got all the swings in, and eating didn’t start to get really hard until the second 3-week cycle of Frankenbuilding (give or take a little).
Anyway, I made it all the way to Week 5, Day 5 (c21w2d5, Thursday, 02 February) before I missed a day: I started getting sick earlier that week, I was really dragging by Wednesday afternoon, and I ended up spending all day Thursday on the couch. Swings just weren’t happening. In fact, nothing happened that day—it was pretty miserable! But I made it 32 consecutive days with at least 500 swings, or 16K total, before my streak broke.
I was right back at it on Friday, though, so it was just the one day of swings I missed.
The swings were all I could muster on Friday—just didn’t have the capacity for more than that—so that meant I also missed the lifting workouts on both Thursday and Friday of that week. I didn’t want to just skip them outright, so I decided to repeat c21w2, complete with the 500 daily swings goal.
Well that would mean 7 weeks (49 days) of 500 daily swings, or 24.5K, and who wants to stop at such a dumb number?
I mean, 25,000 is obviously SO much awesome-r, how could I stop!?!
So that was that: I may have not have made 42 consecutive days of 500 daily swings, but my new goal was to get 25K swings in 50 days, thereby averaging 500 swings per day.
Somehow things didn’t get boring until late into the final week. The work was absolutely about driving my appetite, but I started chasing time goals along the way: After the first or second workout, sub-20:00 times were regular, and something below 15 minutes became the goal. That came on Day 20, with all 5 rounds in 14:49. With that out of the way, I started chasing something below 14 minutes. I got pretty close with 14:16 on Day 24, but it took until Day 40 to actually get below 14: I hit 13:53 on 09 February.
I thought maybe I was done at that point—I wasn’t sure sub-13:00 was physically possible, even with 500 straight swings, never mind 5 rounds of 10-15-25-50—but I began to doubt the veracity of my own achievement in the days that followed: Did I miscount? Did I miss a set? Did I really do 500 swings in less than 14 minutes?
I didn’t trust myself, so I needed to repeat it at least once.
In fact, I did one better: I smashed the 13:53 by almost 30 seconds on Day 45. Yep, 500 swings in 13:25! And it was awesome, too. It wasn’t quite 500 straight swings, but the first 300 were very nearly so, and everything was firing just right that day.
Anyway, I had no interest in trying to push for a sub-13:00 time—despite chasing the Time Dragon, I really was trying to keep the goal the goal—so once I repeated a sub-14:00 time, I kinda lost interest. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I had decided I wanted 25K swings in 50 days.
So that’s what I did!
It required 1000 swings over two workouts yesterday—one for the regularly scheduled work and one as “make-up” for that day I was sick—and I decided to do a second 500-swing workout today as insurance in case I had accidentally miscounted reps, or missed a set here or there, or something like that—that’s almost inevitable over 50 days, I think—but I did it: I got 25K swings in 50 days!
Here at the end of it, I’m glad I committed to it. Much like the goal with those Poundstone curls in 2022, it became much more about mental fortitude than about anything else, even appetite.
That said, I’m sure 500 swings-a-day didn’t hurt my appetite, it was awesome to chase the time goal for awhile, and I think there’s some kind of sweet spot where you’d have to try HARD not to get better at something you’re doing 500 times a day for days on end, whatever that something actually is.
But even so, I won’t be doing 500 daily swings again for A LONG TIME!