17 days in the Asylum!

Seventeen days ago, I decided to take my Insanity training to the next level with Insanity The Asylum. The last seventeen days have been more brutal than the whole 60-day Insanity program.  But it's a whole different kind of brutal. With Insanity, you want to quit because your muscles and body tell you that you have exhausted yourself, in Asylum, you want to quit because your mind tells you, you can't take any more. It really is a whole different ball game.

The Asylum has a total of 7 workouts - Speed and Agility, Strength, Back to Core, Vertical Plyo, Relief, Game Day and Overtime. Back to Core is by far my favorite of all the workouts, due mostly to it focusing on lower back strength. Because of my low back problems, it provides not just a new challenge, but really has helped me on stabilizing those muscles. Game Day is great too, a full 60 minutes of balls to the wall cardio working drills from running, to wrestling and everything in between.

Relief has been the biggest surprise for me though. I am not normally a fan of stretching workouts. Normally they are boring, or go to a place that I just can't get. Also most are really long. Relief in the Asylum though is only about 20 minutes and really gives a nice slow stretch. Maybe I like it so much because I actually feel that my body needs this stretch in this program.

Either way, I am super excited to only have 13 days left in the Asylum. It has been great, and I can't wait to try out some hybrids with it next year.

Hitting the mark

One thing we often do in life is set high goal for ourselves. We will set goals that we know we can't achieve, just for the reason to fail. Think about it for a minute. If you fail, most times you won't try again. This is our way of saying we did something and moving on. But what if we kept striving to accomplish our goals?

That's what I did when embarking on my weight loss journey. I set a near impossible goal of losing 30 lbs in one month. But I kept pushing. That fire from that goal kept burning inside me. I kept pushing and pushing. Now look at me, I have lost 140 lbs and I feel great. Think about that next time you are satisfied or are ready to quit. It's all about pushing yourself. Don't take failure in stride, strive to always do better. Never be satisfied with accomplishing something, you can always do better, push hard, play harder!