Balance

I've talked about my experience in wanting to be able to do a handstand, cleanly, for a satisfactory amount of time, by the end of the year.

http://positiveterminal.blogspot.com/2009/09/handstand.html

The difficulty of this task is compounded by my inability to make use of any sense of balance at all. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but dang, I really got a wakeup call of just how far I need to go yesterday.

I'm doing the P90X workout program. I've been doing it for several weeks once a week with a group (the rest of the time I'm at a standard gym doing my weights). Now that I've got a set of discs, I'm following the prescribed Classic program which is 90 days of a pretty strict routine. I figured this would be easy to follow, it's extremely structured and straightforward - do this that day, change it up this time, don't do that, etc etc. You figure even my little brother would take to the rigidity of it (which he hasn't and seems to find pain in joints he's not even exercising to get out of it).

Yesterday's program was "legs and back." There's about 2 or 3 leg exercises for each round of pullups. I've got a pullup bar in my home, works great, and I'm doing about 80 or so pullups per workout. Not too bad - my goal is to get up to 120 by the end of the program. These aren't straight up chinups - they're varied, some much tougher than others, some wide, some with hands close together, stuff like that. Killer!

But what really burned me was the leg exercises.

I'm good at legs. I press, I squat, I jump, I play volleyball, I run around at football, all that. But man oh man I can't balance worth jack.

Lemme give ya a sight. There's a drill that imitates "speed skating." You're on one leg, then in a motion you're sweeping your other leg back while leaning forward as far as you can. Your hands are up for balance. You're NOT supposed to put your sweeping leg down at all. You're all supposed to be "swish.... swish.... swish.... "

And me? I'm "swish... swish.... *fall*" "swish.... *stumble*" "sw-*trip*" $@#$@%!!!

At least it felt that bad. There were a couple of more exercises that really just made it feel like gravity had it out for me. Deadman lifts (squats on one foot), sneaky lunges (lunges on the toes of your feet for 3 minutes), and even backwards lunges (lunge behind you).

No wonder I'm so interested in going into space.... ;-)