Day 11: CARDIO RECOVERY

Another nice break. I do like the slow strength-building aspects of this practice, but a true yoga practice (vigorous) can do it better if you already have one. If not, this is a great introduction to some basic yoga postures with some bodyweight strength fusion.

I find this one does a decent job at opening hip flexors and hamstrings, and for some angles of hip opening (i.e. bringing the knee in and past the line of the torso). However, it doesn't adequately stretch the quadriceps (internal hip rotation), deep muscles of the hips (external rotation), the chest/front of shoulders, or give equal balance to spinal flexion and extension. That means it needs some backbending to balance out all the forward bends and spinal rounding. Note that those two things are different. Forward bends are bends at the hips where the spine is long and neutral.

If you're familiar with yoga, I highly recommend adding something like supine hero (supta virasana), pigeon (eka pada rajakapotasana), and some basic backbends like cobra (bhujangasana) with a few gentle spinal twists to finish.

My energy felt back to normal yesterday and I went to bed at a normal time without feeling exhausted. I think that energy drink boost was what I needed. I finally feel like I've worked out all the kinks of adjusting to the first month of Insanity. I know I'll need to re-evaluate everything when month 2 hits. But today I felt like I could have taken on another full-on day and put off recovery until tomorrow!