Recently I’ve been getting into designing my own Metcon/HIIT workouts and routines to find fun ways to change up my exercise regime. I really like the 21-15-9 workout repetition scheme from the world of CrossFit so I put together a particularly nasty one which I tried for the first time today:

21-15-9 Routine

• X calories on the rower
• X single-unders
• X air squats
• X burpees
• X calories on the SkiErg
• X 25 KG thrusters
• X 25 KG squat cleans

For a first go I completed it in 25 minutes and 36 seconds. Not an amazing effort, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. I’m not very confident at squat cleans so they take me longer as I want to ensure my technique is as good as possible each time.

A few things I’d change are:

• single-unders: I can’t do double-unders so I thought single-unders would be a suitable replacement, but 21 single-unders is too basic. I might replace it out for something else, potentially something more intensive like the Assault Air Bike.
• air squats: I might change this up to use a weighted bag or ball so there’s more weight (and suffering) during this movement.
• thrusters weight: I’m still relatively weak in the shoulder-press motion so I’m not at the stage of pushing up to CrossFit competition weights of 43 KG, but that will come.
• squat cleans weight: As mentioned above I’m not confident in the squat clean and need to practice it more so my weight is quite low for the moment. I expect to push this up to around 43 KG in time.

If you give it a shot, let me know your time!

Making a few improvements to my Micropub API endpoint app on this wonderful Sunday. Slowly ironing out all the major kinks before I’m ready to open-source it.

Making progress with my ‘1 minute max effort’ calories burnt test on the Assault Air Bike; got 36 today. Aiming to get to 50, hopefully will get there by the end of the year.

Snapped up one of the last tickets to Laracon AU. Looking forward to attending my first developer-centric conference, and one devoted to Laravel.

iOS 12 and watchOS 5 release day 🎉 I’m interested in trying the Screen Time features the most, should be fascinating and scary at the same time to see how much I use my iPhone every day.

iPhone XS looks interesting enough, but not enough for me to upgrade from the iPhone X at this stage. I still find the naming confusing, Roman numerals are dumb (and always have been). New Apple Watch has definitely piqued my interest, might be time for an upgrade from my Series 2.

Started using Symfony Encore recently in a work app as a replacement for hand-rolled webpack configurations. I also looked at Laravel Mix but it doesn’t have as many features or customisations as Encore (for our requirements, at least). So far, I quite like Encore, it definitely makes the simpler parts of a webpack configuration easier.

Spent my Sunday working and watching replays of the 2017 CrossFit Games. So frustrating watching events that you now know someone was taking performance enhancing drugs. Such a frustrating game of cat and mouse.

Just added IndieWeb Rings. Fun idea and great way to discover new sites!

📷 Enjoying this week’s cover of The Economist.