Just recently my hands have been really sore. Not just sore on my callouses from hanging on the bar but sore in my palms, sore in my grip, etc. After talking with coach he suggested getting a rubber band and wrap it around my fingers and work with opening and closing my hand. I’m gonna give that a try for the rest of the week and see if it helps out. I know with time the pain will go away eventually but I’m hoping this helps work out the little muscles in my hand.

In other news, I did pretty well hitting my Eat To Perform targets and I had a sense of relief that I can do this. I CAN eat all this dang food and all the fat pretty easily. What was hard to eat was my Post Workout Meal this morning as it’s about double of what I’m used to eating and lately I have slipped off the PWO Meal anyways. They do suggest Sweet Potato Recovery powder from Simply Pure Nutrients that I may look into because I don’t know that I can always shove that much food down or that I even have the time too regularly. Just add water and I can drink some of those carbs! If anyone has tried it, let me know what you think about it.

Food Front
So with all this eating and adding FAT I finally got in the kitchen to get ahead at least a day so I wasn’t stressing out about what to eat. I also finally bit the bullet and purchased a digital scale. I’ve had an old fashion cheapo one and I never felt like it was accurate but I wasn’t really ever concerned about getting exact breakdowns of my food. With the digital I can easily track grams, ounces, ml which helps me a lot in trying to get an accurate count of my Carbs, Proteins and Fats.

So I cooked up chicken and beef, measured and portioned it all out. I also quick boiled some aparagus, broiled some eggplant, baked more sweet potato and got some kale prepped for salad. I’m also going to share with you how I cooked up my eggplant and a couple of chicken strips. I didn’t originally plan on this so I don’t have pictures of the food in the making. But if I wait to do that properly I may never post about it.

Broiled Eggplant
Super simple to cook and a vegetable I’ve only cooked once. For some reason I’m not drawn to eggplant so I rarely buy it and if I do buy it, it sits in the fridge till it’s bad. So this time when I saw two perfectly purple eggplants and bought them, I was determined to cook them up. And I’m not in the moment of life where I can take time to experiment a whole lot. Turns out this veggie is really easy to cook. Found this on NomNom Paleo. http://nomnompaleo.com/post/4739682522/broiled-zucchini-or-eggplant. She used Zucchini and Globe Eggplant. I’m not quite sure what GLOBE eggplants are but I just bought your typical eggplant that’s purple and odd shaped. I’m not as food savvy as MRS. NOM NOM but I can figure some things out on my own, haha.

Really easy! I promise. Preheat oven to BROIL. Grab a cookie sheet. Line it with foil. Drizzle oil on to cookie sheet. Add salt and pepper to your oil. Cut your eggplant into even slices. Place on oil coated cookie sheet THEN flip eggplant so you can get oil and seasoning on both sides. Broil for 8 -10 minutes, flip halfway through. Once you remove the eggplant from oven you can add a little vinegar or lemon OR BOTH and you have scrumptious eggplant. We even tried coconut aminos and that was wonderful too! I’m hoping it holds up after sitting in the fridge all night.

Fried Chicken Strips
If you have ever fried anything you should be pretty capable to concoct something and season it to your likings. If you’re not a cook or scared of stepping out of step by step instructions, let me tell you, it’s easy to just do whatever. And that’s what I did with some chicken strips that I had.

I took the chicken strips and rubbed chili powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper and lemon pepper all over (use your favorite seasonings). I then took some egg white and put in one dish. And set up another dish with coconut flour, pepper and salt. I made sure the flour and seasonings were mixed well. Take your seasoned chicken, dip and coat it in the egg whites, then dip and coat in your coconut flour. I went ahead and took coated strip and double coated it. While I was prepping everything I had a pan heating up at Medium Heat with 2TBS Coconut Oil. By the time I was done coating my chicken strips the oil was hot enough. Place the chicken in the pan and let cook a couple of minutes (no touching) then flip after 2-3 minutes and let cook through on other side for 2-3 minutes. Really tasty fresh, not as tasty microwaved next day. But a quick and simple protein with some “cheat meal” flare.

So now that I have my kitchen in work mode, I’m hoping I can just keep things rolling along! But now it’s time for the BOOM Box Recap. It’s short and sweet today.

Skill/Strength: 5, 5, 5+ @ 65%, 75% and 85% of 1RM Push PressLast week we found our 1RM Push Press and sadly even though I felt like I could have got more weight up, I only got 95lbs. So using that I was going for 60lbs, 70lbs and 80lbs. My warm up sets and my first round weren’t hard but everything was hurting in an achey kind of way. Finally at 70lbs it felt much better. Got to 80lbs and busted out 10 reps! I went for 11 and failed. Now my arms were really dead! It felt good though to get those 10 reps.

MetCon: 3X – 3 min AMRAP of 5 Burpees and 5 Knees to Elbows, 1 minute rest
3 rounds of that. UGH. It might not be so bad if I was good at KTE. But I am not. I did start off strong in regards to getting my knees up but by the end it was just get knees as high as possible. I dropped after each rep of KTE because my hands were on fire! Burpees are burpees. You just gotta do them. I ended up with a total of 9 rounds + 1 for all the rounds. So that’s averaging 3 rounds per round! Makes sense right?

It’s TUESDAY folks. And I’m already ready for Friday! That’s a problem 😀 Ah well, I’ll just have to chug on through. Hope y’all have a great day and of course BE AWESOME!