At the end of last week, I reluctantly decided to stop exercising. I’d pulled something at the top of my inner thigh/groin, and my back was starting to grumble about five days of intense back-to-back workouts.

Today, my back is still stiff and sore. Part of me is tempted to do a Plyometric Cardio routine and see if this loosens things up. It probably won’t, though, meaning a few days of Ibuprofen and frustration about breaking the flow of the Insanity programme.

Which brings me to my question for you guys: When I’m fit enough to exercise again, do I

1. Restart the Insanity programme from scratch, or
2. Simply pick it up again from where I left off?

Restarting the programme gives me the benefit of doing all Insanity in one block. Presumably there are important benefits to following the full 60-day programme? Picking it up from where I left off would mean less to do, which means I’d finish Insanity quicker.

Which would you do?

On this fifth day, many of the moves in the warm-up, stretches and workout itself are becoming familiar – the suicide drills and ‘level 2′ routines are all starting to seem familiar. Which is good, because most of the workouts we’ve done in this first week are repeated over the next four weeks. That should address a lot of my concerns about form, which I feel is important…

1. To get the absolute most out of every workout. No point in doing Insanity if I’m not going to get every benefit from it.
2. To avoid injury. Bad form puts stress on muscles and joints and leads to PAIN!  Nobody wants that crap!

Pure Cardio

Like I said, the cardio routine was intense as expected. I found a lot of the going pretty tough – those rapid fire push-up/mountain climber moves are guaranteed to frag me every time, but I felt like I gave a solid effort. My one gripe as always was getting exhausted and stopping the DVD to go back and re-do parts. The goal from now on will be to rest less and push that little bit harder during every workout.

On the plus side, there were spots during the workout today where I felt my energy returning and exercises that used to exhaust me gave me a new lease of life. The standing mountain climbers are a good example – I found a burst of energy got me through these. Still struggling with anything to do with push-ups, but slowly improving.

You know what’s good though? Watching the gym bunnies alongside Shaun T flagging under the pressure and occasionally having to sit out to recover. Shaun T himself collapses at the end, so you don’t feel like such a pathetic mess by the end of the workout! Note: Laughed my ass off when Shaun started referring to himself in the third person: “Shaun T is tired now…”

Injuries. Yes, injuries. I mentioned in my Cardio Recovery post that I’d ended up with a sore back yesterday. I was reluctant to start the routine today, but decided to push on and see how it went. And it went pretty well. The back injury didn’t hinder me, but during the workout I felt a worrying pain in my inner thigh up near my groin. It was particularly harsh during the push-up jacks. I’m hoping that it’ll have eased off before Day 6 in case I have to reconsider doing the Insanity programme or take a break for a few days to recover properly.

Diet break

I’m not following the Insanity eating programme. That would be too disruptive to home life, and too much of a learning curve. I am however, eating well, staying hydrated and getting lots of protein.

My question for you: Do you allow yourself an ‘off night’ during the Insanity programme? One where you hit your local Chinese takeaway and pop open a bottle of red wine? I’d like to know what other people are doing…

Instead, the moves are more about stretching and toning to allow you to recover from the previous two days of craziness. And to prepare you for Day 5′s dreaded Pure Cardio routine, which is 40 minutes of non-stop cardio designed to sweat the living daylights out of you. Drink lots of water!

Though it’s not as physically draining as the previous days exercise, Cardio Recovery isn’t without its challenges. One is endurance: there are a few moves, slow squats and pulses that require you to hold a pose until your muscles are fatigued, then pulse to work them a little harder. I actually found this painful to hold and had to cut these short a couple of times. I’m hoping that my stamina for this will improve over the next couple of weeks.

The other discipline is balance – there are a lot of moves that involve tabletop positions and standing on one leg. And doing glute pulses while balancing on your toes.I thought my balance was pretty good, but this was an eye-opener that it could always use improvement.

Aftermath: It’s the morning of Day 5 right now. My muscles aren’t as sore as they were yesterday, but I’ve got a worrying twinge in my back. As a result, I’m going to leave today’s workout until this afternoon to give myself a shot at recovering.Also, has anybody else who’s tried Insanity found themselves needing more sleep than usual? I’m completely knackered this week and sleeping in more than usual. Might need to go to bed earlier if this is the effect!

Catch you later for the Pure Cardio update!

I predicted yesterday that I’d be pretty sore after Day 2. Yeah. Stiff and sore. In my inner thighs, shoulders, chest and calves. Remarkably, not so much across the abs. Which makes me wonder if my form needs some attention.

Now, today I felt pretty exhausted before I even started the Cardio Power session. So, even getting through the warm-up was a struggle. Just a note on the warm-up routine – like everything else in Insanity, you repeat the circuit three times, increasing your intensity each time. So, by the time you get to the end of the warm-up, you’ll be feeling pretty depleted already. Don’t give up though – because the stretching routine that follows allows ample time to recover before starting the workout proper.

As for the workout itself – it’s an extreme session. The Power Jumps are exhausting – you have to leap into the air from a squat position, and do a mid-air crunch, meeting your knees with your palms or elbows. There are other moves that are just as pressured. And then…

Push-ups. My nemesis. My oldest enemy. There are a couple in this routine – a ‘moving push-up’ where you take a step to the side during the push-up, and also a push-up from a V position designed to work the shoulders while holding the abs in a tight contraction. I don’t mind telling you that while my legs are in good condition, my upper body is feeble and pasty and unable to manage more than a few push-ups. It’s quite pathetic.

3 Things I Need To Improve

1. Form. Luckily, some of these routines get repeated, so there’ll be second chances to improve form. Especially as you get increasingly tired, your form can slip.
2. Speed. I found that with some moves, I wasn’t getting much faster. Don’t know if that’s because of fatigue or because I’m quite tall and have further to move(!) But I’d like to be able to move faster as the routine gets more intense.
3. Less rests. Yes, I’m a wimp. There may have been a few instances where I stopped the DVD during a water break so that I could recover more. I need to take less rests rather than allow myself so much extra time. Presumably to get the maximum from the workouts, you need to keep working constantly.

So, that’s Day 3 done. I’ve never sweated so much in my entire life! Day 4 is called Cardio Recovery. I’m hoping that’ll be a slightly easier session. And so is my neighbour.

The aftermath from Day 1: Nothing serious. Yesterday evening was fine, but I woke up this morning with a mild stiffness in my shoulders and inner thighs. No biggie. But I reckon I’ll be stiffer tomorrow!

Day 2: Plyometric Cardio

So what’s “plyometric cardio”, then? Basically, a lot of running a jumping. Intense cardio stuff. If you’ve done any Jillian Michael’s stuff, its kind of like that. But Insanity is much faster. Far more intense.

Similar to the fit test, the Plyometric routine begins with a warm-up and a series of stretches to prepare the body for the rigorous pummelling it’s about to receive.

Once the session begins in earnest, it’s one circuit repeated three times. On each repetition, Shaun T pushes you to work harder. After the third repetition, a second circuit begins – same idea as before – repeat three times doing the moves harder and faster each time. The routine finishes off with a rapid-fire series of boxing-style moves designed to finish off on a cardio high! After that, it’s cool down time, with a repetition of the stretches from the warm-up.

This was an intense session. There were points where I was actually brought to my knees with exhaustion, but overall the routines are quite nicely balanced – there are points in the routine that allow you to recover and points that push you to the brink. Stick with it to the end though and you’ll be satisfyingly sweaty and puffing for air.

Grumbles: I try to watch the DVDs the evening before so that I know what’s coming up in the session and I can be prepared for it. In reality, you can’t really work on form until you’re actually working out. The problem with this (and a lot of exercise DVDs) is that it’s hard to watch the screen while you’re bouncing around a room at top speed! I found myself stopping and rewinding a few times just to get the form right.

Right now (several hours later), the shoulders, pecs and inner thighs are reassuringly stiff. Right after the workout, I experienced a wonderful post-exercise high that lasted for about half an hour. At this point my eyes have been opened – Insanity is not going to be a walk in the park. This is hard work, but it’s also (so far) incredibly rewarding.

Tomorrow: Day 3, Cardio Power & Resistance.

You probably already know what Insanity is. And no, not the glib definition involving straitjackets and sedation (which incidentally, sounds like a regular week night in my bedroom). Insanity is a 60-day intense workout programme fronted by a guy called Shaun T. Probably because having more than one letter in your surname is inefficient. I’ve already started calling him Shaunty.

Why Insanity?

I’m doing Insanity because I need a focused workout series to:

1. Lose a few more kilos to bring me down to my goal of 75kg. Starting weight today was 78.9kg.
2. Tone up and finally achieve the definition in my abs that I’ve been shooting for.
3. Challenge myself to reach a new level of fitness.

Plus, after a running injury stopped me from running long distances, I need a way to maintain my fitness while I recover. So, 60 days of Insanity seems like the right solution. Yeah, plus I’m a vain shit and I want to look good when I go on holiday this summer.

Fit Test Results – Day 1

Okay, so the first day of the Insanity workout begins with a fitness test. This involves a good warm-up, then eight routines lasting one minute each. For each routine, you try to do as many repetitions as possible within the sixty seconds and then you write your results down during a recovery minute. Here’s how I did:

1. Switch kicks: 80
2. Power knees: 40
3. Power knees: 62
4. Power jumps: 18
5. Globe jumps: 7
6. Suicide jumps: 19
7. Push-up jacks: 21
8. Low Plank Oblique: 47

Points where I felt great: Plank-based moves are a favourite of mine, so I felt like I got a good score on the Suicide Jumps (which is a more testosterone-driven name for what Jillian Michaels calls Burpies) and the Low Plank Oblique was quite good too.

Points where I felt utterly pathetic: I’ve heard that some fitness instructors taking Insanity for the first time have struggled with it. That’s reassuring! The Globe Jumps have an incredible knack for sapping your strength. Plus, we have a light-shade in our room that I kept clashing with. Annoying. I also struggled with the power jumps – they’re exhausting, and it’s difficult to get your form right on them.

Overall impression: Day 1

I might have been a bit gung-ho going in, expecting this to be reasonably tough but do-able. But Insanity required a lot more effort than I’ve been used to giving recently, so there’s definitely a challenge in there to push harder and get better results.

The warm-ups and cool downs were fine, sensible parts of the workout for preparing your body for the tougher workout in the middle. It worked up a good sweat though. Something I found strange was that though the power jumps and globe jumps sapped my strength, the recovery between routines was enough to allow me to finish the later exercises quite strong. I’m sure tomorrow will be less forgiving…

The complete series:

1. Day 1 (this post)
2. Day 2: Plyometric Cardio
3. Day 3: Cardio Power & Resistance
4. Day 4: Cardio Recovery
5. Day 5: Pure Cardio

A little bit about me: I’m Gerard McGarry. I’m a blogger and web designer from Northern Ireland and the co-founder of the UK’s biggest reality TV blog, Unreality TV.

When I’m not slavishly staring at a laptop screen, I’m a husband and father of three adorable, funny kids. And when I’m not doing that, I love nothing more than running, working out in circuit classes and climbing mountains.

And when I’m not doing that, I play bass with a bunch of good friends in a band called Revolver. All in all, I believe in living a fun-packed, positive life and I love connecting with people on the web and chatting about television, music and movies. If you’re into the same things I am, subscribe to this blog, hit me up on Twitter, or contact me through my personal website.

What I’m up to right now: I’m currently working on the USA version of Unreality TV, writing about music, movies and television for the site.

I wonder if it’s smarter to link Skewster to this WordPress account rather than doing another self-hosted option? I’d like to change the design though, so that might be a consideration…

While it all worked rather well, it resulted in a pretty cluttered interface that looked rather crap. So, I’ve mixed things up a little bit, decided to use the P2 theme which allows for rapid input as well as threaded responses from commenters. I’ll probably just add my thoughts and links to stuff I’ve written around the web for the moment and we’ll see how it goes!

I’ve been dying to use this Live Writer thing for a while now!

Two big things about PopOpinions that I want to share:

1. The collaboration thing is so that the blog doesn’t depend on any one blogger – the community powers the site. I’ll build in some more social features along the line to support interaction between the members.
2. It’ll be mostly about OPINIONS and cover a variety of topics – politics, entertainment, showbiz, religion…you name it. I want this to be a place where people can let rip their ideas about whatever takes their fancy. You can review stuff, or you can shout about something you heard on the news today.

Anyway, that’s all I’m saying for the moment. If might accept beta testers if anyone’s interested. Drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.

I love the SEOmoz blog, by the way.

Anyway, we’ve been toying with other blogging ideas and the most likely at this juncture are blogs on music and regular telly. So let me introduce you to two of our works in progress:

1. Unreality Music – Soon to be a place of music reviews of current tunes and past classics. I’ll be taking the lead on the music blog, and I want it to feature not only established acts, but unsigned acts a la MySpace. We’ll also be accepting guest reviews and contribution, particularly of recent gigs.
2. Unreality Primetime – Lisa’s going to be taking the lead on this new blog, looking at other popular TV shows like The OC, Desperate Housewives, all that stuff. It’ll be a much bigger blog than the reality TV one, but it’s good to watch alternative shows too!

You can conclude from this that Lisa has definitely got square eyes. As do most of our readers! But we love them all and they love us back!

There will be boards on the Unreality Forum to support all of the new areas we’re covering.

We’re excited about how the Unreality blogs are unfolding. We’re going along to press conferences, working with production companies, getting 300,000+ eyeballs on our blog each month, not to mention the thousands of comments people have been compelled to leave for us and even for reality show contestants. These additional blogs will hopefully complement what we already have while creating a spot for people to discuss different types of music and television.

If you want to become a contributor to Unreality, please do get in touch with me.

Fantastic!

Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a little instructional for those who are considering moving away from Dreamhost too.

Actually, I’ve had it for some time now, but I’ve been sitting on it without any idea what to do with it. Now, I’ve moved it to my new Media Temple account and I’ve done an installation of Drupal. I came across Drupal at first on the Performancing site, and I’m intrigued at the mix of forum/blogs that it allows you to create.

So, as a long time WordPress aficionado, I’m crossing into uncharted territory with this labyrinthine content management system.

Initially I tried to record it so that I could do a podcast, but I had such a small timeframe between setting up my computer and starting the interview that I couldn’t get it right. I’m using a combination of Skype and a program called PrettyMay, which helps you record Skype conversations among other things!

The lesson to be learned is to prepare for this in advance. Although I was given a remarkably quick timeframe today, I’ve wanted to look into podcasting before now, but haven’t bothered. I’ll have it nailed next time!

Anyway, the interview was great fun. The Unconventionals were one of the finalist acts in this year’s X Factor, and they were booted off last night’s show by Simon Cowell. I thought they were very original and was disappointed they went out of the competition so soon.

Lucy was great to interview, very chatty and natural and more than a little surprised in the interest in her and the group. I hope they go on to better things!

I love this part of my job!

(satisfied sigh)

Reading the comments in their blog post, I was surprised by the number of people who were sticking up for the company on the strength of a couple of blog posts issued after the disaster. Some folks seem oblivious to the fact that downtime of the sort Dreamhost has suffered recently is actually unacceptable.

I wonder if some of these people are blog kiddies who don’t appreciate the importance of uptime for a business website. Who ignore the issues of lost revenue and reputation an online business can face. Dreamhost didn’t deal with these issues in their blog post. Apparently belated openness will soothe the complaining customers!

Dreamhost Dropping Negative Comments

The reason I’m writing this post is because I tried to post a comment on the blog today and received a message that I’d triggered a spam filter. Bizarre? You bet. No profanity in my post at all, no links, nothing that I can think would trigger a spam filter.

Anyway, I’ve decided to repost my entire comment here, lest Dreamhost conveniently delete it from their filters instead of allowing free speech on the blog:

I’m surprised at the immaturity of some of the people posting here. Attacking Karen for expressing her point of view is wrong – she has perfectly valid points.

While I applaud Dreamhost for their blog updates, they’ve conveniently sidestepped the issue of compensation for business customers who’ve lost income through this downtime (and my sites were hit hard).

And yes, there’s a veiled admission of incompetence in this post that doesn’t give much confidence in how the network will be rebuilt! There’s a group of DH users running around with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to this!

And you can make all the claims you like about ‘getting what you pay for’, but when I signed up I didn’t see any warnings on the front door saying “Not suitable for business users” or “Unreliable uptime – non-critical sites only”.

I do hope you get the problems ironed out once and for all, but like others I’m shoping around.

Update: I actually forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago, but checking for my comment as detailed above I notice the Happy Dreamhost Sneaky Comment Deleting Team have sneakily deleted my comment. So much for opening conversation in the blogosphere between customers and suppliers!

What would Mr Steve Rubel have to say about that?

So, in an effort to rein in some of my online activities, this is the big list of me…on the web:

My Blogs

• GerryBot: This blog – my personal one.
• Unreality TV: My reality TV blog and music, now primetime television as well.
  
• The Northern Ireland Guide
• Scribble Designs: My web design site
• Family Of Five

Professional Profiles

• Currently using LinkedIn as a way of promoting my professional skills online. It’s a great social networking site, and if you’re a member, please look me up or add me to your network. My LinkedIn profile.

Social Bookmarking

• StumbleUpon: Embarrassingly, I managed to email everyone in my contacts list from Stumbleupon – I will insist it was software misdirection, not user malfunction, until I die.
• Del.icio.us: The daddy of social bookmarking tools and still my number 1!
• Reddit, an up and coming social bookmarking site. Similar to Digg but not so many a**holes.
• Ma.gnolia
• Digg: A more tech oriented site, lots of interesting articles and discussions. Can be juvenile.
• Shadows: An interesting social bookmarking, let down by too many spam links.
• Simpy: Not the prettiest online bookmarking tool.

Blogs and Forums

• Performancing
• Digital Point Forums

Photography

• My Flickr Page and Profile

Reality TV

• Unreality TV Forum
• Popsugar Profile

From September onward, Lisa spent her evenings blogging about the 2005 series of X-Factor. I approached the site as an experiment in Search Engine Optimisation, dividing up categories and giving pointers on how to make best uses of keywords in each post.

From these inauspicious beginnings, we continued to put on new posts diligently and keep the site up-to-date.

Now, almost a year later, it’s high season for reality tv shows in the UK: Big Brother is in full swing and Love Island has just started. Unreality TV has taken something in the region of 114,000 hits in June and at this mid-point in July, we’ve had 64,000 visitors. Traffic has been building month upon month and we’ve just opened the doors on our long-awaited reality tv forum.

We’re interested in taking Unreality TV to greater heights. Two things we want in the immediate future:

1. Sponsors/Advertisers: We’d like the site to be earning a decent living so that we can concentrate on creating better content and forging better links with the reality tv industry. To that end, we may have to kill Google AdSense in favour of direct advertising.
2. More visitors: We’ll be focussing on getting Unreality TV more visible and encouraging participation. The forum is in it’s early stages right now, but I’ve already started using it to point out other great reality TV writing on the web.

This part of things is definitely outside of the old comfort zone: getting this amount of hits so far has been amazing, but pushing it further is new territory for us. It’ll be exciting to see how things progress!

Anyway, Brian kept plugging away with his music and recorded new material with Gary Connolly back in March, in a studio in Dublin. He’s posted two of his Outhouse Cookie-era songs on MySpace along with one of the new tracks on which he sings.

The two Outhouse Cookie songs are Love Declared and No Guarantees, featuring a guitar solo from Seamy “Asmodean” Meredith that still gives me goosebumps today. I wish I could conjure up Seamy Meredith one last time and tell him that. He seems to have disappeared from the Internet, though…

Anyway, check out Mullan’s music over at MySpace and let me know what you think. Whenever I get a moment, I may post the other Outhouse Cookie songs here.

Contrary to popular belief, Northern Ireland is a fantastic place to live! I personally don’t think there are enough websites spreading this message. We are not oppressed, repressed or depressed people, so don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Take it with a pinch of salt!

So, without further ado, we present to you The Northern Ireland Guide – our journal of everything Northern Ireland: culture, events, tourist attractions, things to do and place to eat, sleep and party.

The site has only been live for a couple of days now, but we’ve had a positive response from quite a few people who’ve come across the blog and want to help out, either by way of providing backlinks or submitting material to the site. I’m glad, and I hope the support continues.