This week seemed to "fly" by.(sorry, that was an awful pun...),

I was pretty excited this week when I was able to accomplish one of my goals. I was able to pull off a full and complete back bend without the use of my hands including recovery of it. 

If you are wondering, it looked a little like this...

So that was really exciting. This is not the first time that I was able to accomplish it, but it was the first time I was able to do it for a camera. It was hard. My problem is that I put a lot of weight on my head so when I need to get back up, I have to shift a lot of weight to my feet so either I end up falling back over when I crane my neck up, or I give a pretty big stumble when I do come up. But this can be fixed, and will be fixed. 

Some things that will help me: 

1. My back isn't too flexible yet. I need to do a lot more stretching there so it is not as tense when I do this.

2. Because my back can't bend too comfortably yet, I sink too low with my legs and loose a lot of strength they give on the way back up. I need to use them more for the upward pull then for letting my body down.

3. I also need to start practicing with the mace I will be using as a counter-balance instead of the camera stand that I am holding in this picture. The mace is lighter but most of that weight is down near the ball on the far end so it is a completely different feel.

The nice thing about my efforts is that this is the clothing that I will be wearing while trying to perform this move. This assures that I know what kind of weight my jacket has(which feels really heavy at times like these), and also allows me to feel the "stretching limits" of the uniform. With long dress pants, your legs don't bend too well so i have to set my legs just right in order to receive the maximum "stretchy-ness". The shoes are also a little weird. They are just loose enough that the soles want to stay flat on the ground allowing my feet the slide sideways in the shoes. This is a problem for when I need to get back up.

As for swimming, I was not able to get into the pool again this week. I will be continuing the workouts of push-ups and such until such times that I am able to be swimming again. I am currently doing several practices for a Ultimate Frisbee Club team that I am on. This provided a lot of coordination that is really nice to practice and also endurance training. Both of these I can take back to the pool for fly improvements.

But as it goes, this is my last mandatory blog post. My overall view of this project is very positive. Though I couldn't achieve a much more improved Butterfly, I did improve upon my back-bend a lot.

In the future both of these goals are thing that I will be trying to make a reality. One day maybe I will have a picture of myself flying through the water or, even more important to me, a picture of me kissing the turf with the crown of my head to the ecstatic cheers of the crowd.

Until next time. Stay classy.

Brigham