Friday and Sunday

Let's recap the last few days.

Friday we got into Starting Strength with the goal of finishing quickly and getting the weekend started. It was a long week and we all needed to relax!

Squat started off with 175, and I felt pretty good about these. For some reason they hurt so much at the bottom, and I'm starting to think that that's never going to go away. But after the first set (the first set is always the hardest) I felt like I was able to go fast still with solid form. Not extremely fast, but definitely like I can control the weight. If I have to hold that much weight I'm going to do it as quickly as possible and that's what I did. So overall I felt good about them.

Shoulder press was next, and somehow I didn't finish 115. I did 4x5 and 1x4. The very last rep my whole body just gave up and I couldn't lift the weight anymore. It was lame!

I finished with 3x5 on pullups and called it good.

That was Friday. We've put abs on hold until the first of the year.

Sunday I was at WalMart, and low and behold they were selling PT247! If you read this blog often you know that I have an obsession with fitness DVDs, and this is one that's been on my list for a while now! I also hate ordering fitness DVDs online (at least from their regular store....I'm still an Amazon.com junkie), so seeing this at WalMart was a great find. This is basically an amped up version of Tae Bo, taught by Billy Blanks and everything! The big difference is the attitude of the whole thing (way more self defense than just aerobics to music) and as you probably know I'm a martial arts junkie too. This was right up my alley. Also cool about it is the gloves that come with it. They are mock MMA gloves that connect to resistance bands which connect to your feet. The whole program is like this (I'll get to why that's cool in a moment) where you use the gloves, and since it's designed around the gloves every move focuses on using them correctly. Just holding my arms up in guard was difficult!

The reason the bands themselves are cool, though, is that this is a new trend I'm seeing in the fitness DVD craze. Too many people are pirating the DVDs, so now trainers are selling DVDs with a piece of equipment and designing the workout around that equipment. This makes it much harder to pirate, and since I'm kind of a late night TV fitness equipment junkie too I find the trend amazing. I also want to get Rip 60 someday too, but that's a different story. They were selling it at WalMart also, but I wanted PT247 more.

So I got home, sat on the couch for a while, and then around 4:45 hit play on Cardio from PT247. This was a great workout! It was like a shortened version of the punching part of Kenpo X. Just combos and movement. But like I said, with these gloves just holding my arms up in guard was pure pain! Throwing punches was really difficult too! Overall I was very impressed, and might be doing another workout tonight.

The only thing I didn't like was how short this workout was. I guess they're all a little over 30 minutes and I need (want) more of a workout than that. So I also hit play on Level 2 of Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred. I'd done level 1 twice before and felt ready for level 2. This was a good workout, working pretty much the whole body in about 22 minutes. Mostly weights (endurance wise) and cardio with a little ab work. It's 3 circuits of 3 minutes of strength, 2 minutes of cardio and 1 minute of abs. I really like this workout and will be doing it again (even though it's for girls...ha!).

So ya, good Sunday for working out. Tonight is Starting Strength. This is my last week of organic protein and I'm looking forward to getting back into synthetics next week. Also tonight starts the new Monday/Thursday routine. Should be fun. And if my friends Jacqi or Rod decide to come over early I'm going to get them in the gym and we'll do a cardio DVD. Probably the cardio/combo one from ESP-XC, but we'll see.

Bring it!