This year I’ve been doing a whole bunch of different sports. It started out with doing functional training at home for the first few months of 2020 when all went to hell. Then around May I started running again; I still wasn’t an efficient runner so it was a bit of a challenge. Then I started road cycling. Everything was great. I was mostly focussing on improving my cardiovascular system; heart, lungs, recovery, sleep, etc.

Then July hit and I started going to the gym again; that was tough. I’d forgotten what lifting all sorts of heavy weights was like on the muscles. It was a long way to getting used to working out regularly again. I also went long distance road cycling a couple of times which was intense, but fun. And then mid-august, I started mountain biking. And things suddenly got even tougher.

Physiologically, mountain biking isn’t bad. It’s certainly challenging with all the exposed tree roots, rocks, berns and other features you have to contend with. With any functional training, shoulders always seem to be my weakness. And with mountain biking it’s specifically been the rotator-cuffs. The ride isn’t bad, but the days after I feel it in the shoulders. So mountain biking has been competing with the gym for time when it comes to recovery.

Since I’ve been back at the gym things have slowly gotten better. I’ve figured out quite a few things with my running which I’ll post about separately. I haven’t done much functional training since the summer weather started. And I hope to get in more mountain biking before the season’s over.

What I have discovered is that doing all these exercises in the same week is doable. What is hard is getting the body to adapt to the new movements. And adding a new sport while you’re in a good training schedule will most likely derail everything. My goal for the next six months is to keep training all these sports as much as possible and not let winter get in the way. That is all about training the most difficult muscle, the brain.