Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Day 67: Getting Better

On the first day of my healthy life, I had a hard time doing lots of things that I needed to do to reach my goal of losing weight and becoming healthier.  It was hard to keep going at times, but I knew it would get better eventually.

Day 1

·         Couldn’t run on the treadmill for more than 8-10 minutes at a time.  I had to stop and walk for a couple minutes in between to get to 30 minutes

·         Could do only about 5 push ups

·         Could not complete 25 reps of ab exercises without stopping

·         Had a hard time staying within my calorie restraints

·         Had a really hard time getting up early to work out

It’s hard for your body to start doing something that it’s not used to doing.  It’s easy to stay where you are and not change.  This blog was part of telling my self to stick to it, and not quit.  If I quit, not only would I feel bad about it, I would let you all down too.  That’s even worse!  How embarrassing!  That has kept me going at times when I really wanted to stop on my way in to work and get a yummy chicken biscuit. It is also what keeps me waking up early to go to the gym.  I knew one day, it would be easier.

I started to notice that things were easier last week.  It was during the whole heartrate-monitor-calorie-burn-fiasco [Day 61: If aFight with My HR Monitor], that I noticed that my calorie burn dropped.  Not only because of the faulty burn reading from my HR Monitor, but because my heartrate was lower during my workouts because I was more fit! My HR used to average around 155 during a workout.  Now it averaged 140-145 during the same workouts.  That means I’m getting better!!

Day 67

·         I can run for 20 minutes on the treadmill at 5.0 speed without stopping!

·         I can do about 20 push ups without stopping!

·         I can do more than 3 ab exercises [from P90X Ab Ripper] for 25 reps without stopping!

·         I can mostly stay in my calorie restraints [sometimes you need a microwaved moon-pie, really they are delicious!]

·         I get up 4-5 times a week at 5:45 am to go to the gym!

Yay!  I can do this!  The only thing about getting better that sucks is that burning the same amount of calories per workout will be that much harder.  I need to work harder to get my heart rate up to 150/160 where I need to burn 10 calories per minute.  I need to workout for longer to get the most calorie burn out of my workout.  This means, I need to up my time or really up my effort to get my heart rate up there.

So far, I have added small weights and jump rope to my circuit training.  This helps get the heart pumping in the times during the work out where my heart rate seems to dip.  This morning I threw in about 30 sec to 1 minute of jump rope during and after the arm exercises in the circuit to keep  my heart rate up.  [I am pretty sure I looked kinda silly jumping rope in my gym…ha!]  Then I added in a freaky core exercise an old trainer taught me, before my ab workout.  It’s called the Stability Ball Tuck [and Pike].  I haven’t tried the pike part yet though…it looks scary.  Right now, I just bring my knees in to my chest with my feet on the ball.  When I did this a few years ago with a trainer, my body would shake all over.  It was soooo hard!  Surprisingly, it still did that, but not as bad as back then!!??!!  Crazy huh!  I’m gonna keep doing it.  You should try it too!  Here is a video of it on YouTube.  Gotta love the groovy music with it…ha.  This girl does an awesome job!  She’s with www.fitsquad.ca.


Now that I can do more than I used to do, I need to step it up.  Anyone got any suggestions on how to ramp up my workouts? Please comment on the blog or on Facebook!!  THANKS!!!

And thanks for keeping me going!! J

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