Week 1 Down

First week back to work after the holidays, first week on the new workout plan from online fitness coach Lindsey.

To recap, this was my week:

Monday – Pulse Pyramid + Steady State Cardio + Abs. The Pulse Pyramid is made up of 5 different exercises. You do exercise #1 for 30 seconds, rest for 30 seconds, then do exercises #1 + #2 for 30 seconds, then rest for 30 seconds and so on until you work your way up to all five exercises. Then you start taking an exercise away each time, until you work your way back down to one. You count your total reps of all exercises.

The pulse pyramid took about 20 minutes, then I did 25 minutes on the treadmill and my Ab exercises – Single leg extension, side plank, plank.

Unfortunately, I kept messing up on my counting. I’d be counting along 50, 51, 52…36, 37, 38…Wait a minute…something’s not right here…

Tuesday – Cardio Intervals. Very similar the intervals I had been doing, though definitely a bit more challenging. Where I had been doing run/walk, these intervals are sprint/walk/build up (ie. go faster in preparation for your next running interval). Also, a longer duration. I was feeling great though, after a couple of weeks of rest. So of course I decided I could go faster…which I did for a couple of intervals and then had to slow right back down. I ended up with a couple of run/walk/walk intervals in there.

We’ll just call that testing my boundaries, and consider the lesson learned, shall we?

Wednesday – Supersets followed by Steady State Cardio. I was supposed to do Abs, but got carried away with my walk on the treadmill and ran out of time. Oops.

Thurday – Cardio Intervals + Abs. Less rested, not feeling quite so easy today. But this time I kept my paces steady. Did my Abs to make up for skipping on Wednesday.

Friday – Timed Circuit + Steady State Cardio + Abs. I had a circuit of 4 exercises, and had to do 4 rounds as fast as I could. This involved jumping rope 100 times. The first time I actually got up to 97 without missing a beat. I was pretty proud of that since it’s something I hardly ever do. The next 3 did not go quite as well, and I did manage to whip myself on the butt quite hard a couple of times; I almost expected it to leave a welt. Also, burpees. I really suck at burpees. I was laughing by the end as I was almost falling over trying to do the last few. I don’t imagine that did much for my time.

I really had to force myself to get on the treadmill after the timed circuits though. I felt about ready to collapse in a heap. But I told myself I’d do 20 minutes. About 17 minutes in, I got my second wind and ended up doing 40 minutes instead. And then the final Abs session.

Whew! I made it.

Saturday – Just for the heck of it, because I have a couple of new DVDs that I want to try out – Ellen Barrett’s Fusion Flow. The back of the DVD describes Fusion Flow as a peaceful workout that “feels like a warm embrace.” Some of it was very relaxing, but there were a couple of challenging segments in there too. But overall, I’d say an enjoyable workout.

There was no – or very little food blogging last week. Part of it was no real grocery shopping or meal planning, part of it was getting back into the swing of the work week, and part of it was not wanting to spend time on blogging due to this…

I had planned to get back on track with things this week, but here it is almost 1:30 on Sunday and I have yet to get out to buy groceries because I have not had access to the car (one of the down sides of being a one car family).

Husband went out computer gaming at a friend’s house yesterday afternoon. I woke up this morning to find that he had not come home. Turns out there was a fire up the street from the friends’ apartment and Husband has not been able to get the car out because every thing is blocked off. Hopefully he’ll make it home sometime to day, and hopefully in time for me to get out and buy some groceries.

Edit: Husband got home around 2:20, safe and sound. It was an apartment building that caught fire, no fatalities but 5 people lost their homes.