Last week I took a cruise to Alaska to help my Mom celebrate her 60th birthday. Cruises aren’t my thing, and this one included much less working out and much more eating than normal. The sad result, 3lbs up. Yuck. A nagging puppy-related injury (fell off some stairs trying not to step on my over-exuberant dog) also kept me from running on board.
Luckily all that time off meant I was fully healed up and well rested. The SFF took delight in putting me through some seriously painful moves at Ultimate Fitness today.
We started with my nemesis, the jump rope. Seriously, I look like an idiot using it. You’d think it wouldn’t be too tough to jump rope for a solid 2 minutes. Perhaps for someone more coordinated it isn’t tough, but damn it if I didn’t step on the darn thing, whack myself in the foot or shin or otherwise mess up every few rotations. If I got 10 in straight I was pretty pleased with myself.
We then did long walking low strides with 20lbs in each hand, 20 total steps, followed by 20 slow curls.
Then 2 minutes on the hell rope.
Another time through the low strides, and rope again.
And then, the pain. As she did not have a name for the damn thing other than “Up, down, side to side” I have named it The Panther’s Bane. You begin with 2 dumbells off to the side of your body, mine were 20lbs each. You then get into an arm-extended plank (like pushup position). Bring yourself down to your elbows into a plank, then back up to arms extended. Then you reach under your body and grab one dumbell and pull it to the other side. Then get the other one. That’s one rep. Elbows, up, reach and pull the weights over. 20. Freaking times. That was brutal, sweat poured off of me, making the mat slick, which made the balance tricky. But finally I was done.
ROPE TIME. /yay
Then another run through the bane. By this point I was almost hucking the things underneath me in an attempt to make sure that when my arms failed, I would not plummet down onto a pointy and jagged dumbell. I managed not to impale myself.
You know what would hit the spot? ROPE. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Finally I laid down with a 35lb barbell bar straight armed ahead of myself, and (keeping knees as straight as possible) brought my feet up to touch the bar, first on the left, then the right. 20 times total.
R
O
P
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Find out what it means to me!
Once more with the barbell and I was done. I feel like someone tumble dried me and then threw me down a set of stairs. WOO. Let’s see if I can keep the legs healthy enough to get an entire week of running in before my next workout. I got 3lbs to send packing!
