Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! We have a little bit of exciting news here. First off, this blog is going to be going “pro” soon, with a new URL. Hosting it myself is going to give me a little more control over the look, feel and layout, so that’s fun. Secondly, my amazing trainer, the Sac Fitness Fairy Rossana has agreed to write a weekly guest column here for my readers on a variety of topics, from training tips to nutrition, which is super awesome and rad! Look for her first column later this week.
So with that out of the way, let’s dive into this week’s workout. Usually when I work out it is all about reps. 10 here, 20 there. Count up to 21, count down to 0, pyramids, etc. Today was timed, and boy what a difference.
If you have, say, 10 reps of something, you can usually push hard and get those last tough 2 or 3 out of the way, and you move on. The danger, of course, is breaking your form (which is why we have trainers!) but sometimes knowing you’re almost there gives you that extra oomph to push through a few more reps. Timed workouts don’t give you that ability to push hard for a short burst to get through. Time is time, though honestly sometimes it seems to slip by SLOWER the tougher the movements you are doing are. There’s no way to make it zip by, and getting in that last rep… then another, and come on just one more… well, it is tough and a good way to mix things up.
We began with a progression similar to last week’s, with a minute of rope followed by 20 mountain climbers, then a minute of rope and 40 mountain climbers, adding 20 each time until 100. That was the warmup and the only time we counted reps.
We then swapped back and forth between a minute of rope and a minute of an exercise, running through 5 different exercises.
The first was supposed to be step back jump squats, but the knees are a bit unhappy with the jumping so I did weighted step back squats instead. Then we moved on to pushups. A minute of pushups is no joke! We followed on with bicycles, essentially a crunch where you pull to one side while bringing a knee up, the with other leg hovering just above the ground. Again, burn baby, burn. Then we did bicep curl squats followed by… burpies. Yes, a minute of burpies. Keep in mind, there’s a minute of jump rope in between each of these exercises. Once through a round we did it again. SFF had hoped for three rounds but two floored me like a roundhouse kick to the temple.
Penance my dear readers, penance for pumpkin and pecan pie…
