How Running With Me Looks Like and Challenge updates

A mid week workout update? Just to show you how sporadic things are over here. I’ve been working hard to get all those posts I promised to bloggers on top of that. Lets hope I clear some stuff off my to-do list this weekend, while having family visit and fixing the house and trying to finish up a work deadline, oh, and those darling income taxes. Maybe thats why I’m writing about working out because thats been the most calming time.  I don’t even need music to do it anymore.

As of the last post, the weather has been ridiculous.  For one, we had a snowfall with a bit of accumulation last week so forget about my following that Walker to Runner routine.  I had my first run two weekends ago because it was lovely weather and being the amateur I was, I went out running in a sweater and man, I heated up so quick. I did for a short 3km walk/run in the early evening. On that same day, I came home and did Day 1 of the Beach Body Challenge!

Today, I just finished Day 12! A little recap on progress.  I’m starting to really feel how I haven’t been training doing push ups in a while so even 30 is slightly hitting hard, but I know I’m improving.  Bicycles, crunches and planks are all just testing my abs and its muscular endurance.  So far its been pretty good.  2 mins planks near the slightly shaky phase.  I’m not a huge fan of tricep dips as they are my weakness so its good to get back into doing those, same goes for wall squats.  I can’t imagine Day 14 coming up and I have to do a minute of those.  Burpees are pretty tough too.  I never had to do 50 in one go so thats the biggest challenge.  Aside from that, I like the cardio inserts with butt kicks, skaters, jumping jacks and high kicks.  Tiring and refreshing at the same time 🙂 So far, it seems that I feel like its a bit more promising on me completing this. Thats already a pretty good start!

 

As the weather warmed up and the snow went away, rain stopped falling and chilly winds moved away a little, Saturday cleared up and it was a lovely day.  I mean, it was a no jackets day pretty much or have a jacket but don’t zip up type of day.  After all the house errands were done, it was early afternoon and I went out for a quick jog and to get some images in for the #RunWithMe event thats going on in Tribesports.  I sent them in and here’s my GIF that defines me as a runner.  Credits to my boyfriend for being a champ and walking behind me and snapping random shots 🙂

 

Isn’t that pretty cool? Now, what is your running story?

Maybe you’d like to join into the Run With Me campaign and get your own little GIF to motivate yourself and other runners. Click on the image to get the instructions on where to send your images and they’ll do this for you 🙂 Other than my best friend and my boyfriend, Tribesports has been immense at keeping me motivated with everything.  If you are on Tribesports, add me! By the way, thats my Twitter contact there but I’m @kimtranquildreams on TS community 😉

I’ve only done two jogs in 10 days but thats already better than last year’s 2 jogs in 3 months. I’m really seeing the appeal of it.  I’m ver much still a beginner at this and I’ll figure out what works best for it but no doubt, its a amazing feeling and I look forward to training to be a better runner. As the weather warms up and my lungs can deal better with it, I’ll be getting a bit more intense.  Right now, I’ll take it a little easier and build up slowly 🙂

Things are definitely getting back on track with my work out motivation after a month of break.  I’m ready to take on this summer!

Here’s to running more and building a better balanced lifestyle.  Its only the first step. I’ll be back in 2 weeks with another update probably! 🙂

What are your workout strengths and weaknesses? Are you a runner? Are there exercises you absolute love or hate doing?

Week 41&42: Starting Over Sucks, So Keep Going!

You know why I need to put that up front because I had to take a little break from working out because of my fall on that piece of ice.  Apparently keeping up and doing workouts was not helping and it came one day a week later that my knee just hurt like hell and I barely could walk without it aching.  So, the last two weeks have been more about eating well than working out.

Still, I managed to get in a few workouts.

First one was a short one consisting of 3 moves that I did 3 rounds of from Tone it Up for abs.

These only look easy but they were actually pretty tough after a while.  It was also very effective.  Great workout 🙂

Next up, I believe I’ve posted it before but I did a full Intermediate round for Tribesports’s Women’s Fitness Home Workout.

I did 3 rounds of this and it was so painful by the last round.  Dorsal Raises actually really helped my back.  One Legged Bridges were shaky mostly because I was doing a challenge and it already had bridge.  Any of these, by the third round started feeling pretty intense.

Now, whats amazing is that for the most part, I kept up with my 12 Days of Fitness Challenge.

My first full body accumulator workout challenge was actually aside from being painful for a few of these, it was also pretty fun and challenge.  The final few days were pretty crazy since it hit right before the holiday so I had a day or two of double days packed into one and those were the ones I cursed myself.

For the most part, doing those other challenges this year made 12 crunches, 11 lunges, 9 chair dips, 8 squats, 7 mountain climbers and 6 pushups feel like nothing at all.  4 Burpees aren’t extremely hard either and 5 Star Jumps were pretty cool. I personally hate Tuck Jumps because they are so hard to control and oh so hard to not injure myself again.  Still, the absolute worst part of all this was doing the wall squat.  I still hate it, from start to finish.  I did get better after 12 days but I still have such a long way to go.  I believe bridge was the one with the biggest improvement but I did a lot of it had to be attributed with just being bored of staying propped up for the full 3 minutes and have nothing but stare at my lilac ceiling.

It was still very awesome!

Whats not so awesome was my Dietbet.  Why? Well, not working out also meant that losing weight became harder as well.  So I pretty much stagnated and didn’t go any further and fluctuated in the last week between 133-135 lbs depending on the day.  Still, I hold true that I did change my eating habits and I look forward to keeping it up.  I’ve swapped in all whole wheat options now and I am looking into healthier substitutes even when I bake and cook, so everything is heading in the right direction and this week, I resume my workouts as well!

2014 goals coming up  tomorrow! Remember to drop by, k? 🙂

Week 14: All about the Abs!

I love working on my core and this week’s daily challenge is for our abs! My goal is to eventually get some 4 pack or 6 pack.  I think that’ll look quite awesome! So, lets start off this week.

Monday

Today’s goal was 30 minute jog and doing the butt exercise from Tone It Up followed through with our daily challenge of today’s being 100 squats throughout the day.  I never do the jogging stuff so forget about it.  At my job, there is no chance I could start doing squats, so after taking a really long walk with my boyfriend like 45 minutes or something, I took a break and then did 100 squats straight through.  After that, I took another little break and instead of that same exercise every week, I switched it up and did the Brazilian Butt Workout featured by a fellow blogger, The Haute Bunny that I found on Pumps and Iron’s workout roundouts a month or two ago.  That workout owned me big time.  It murdered me after one round.  I had to stop even though it was supposed to be 3 rounds.  Just to give you a quick idea of the rundown of one round, here it is:

• 20 Plie Squats
• 20 Donkey Kicks per side
• 20 Fire Hydrants per side
• 20 circling Donkey Kicks per side
• 20 Frog Jumps
• 20 Side Lungers per side
• 30 alternating Split Jumps (here’s where it starts going downhill)
• 30 Alternating Sliders
• 30 Hip Lifts
• 20 Lunge Kicks per side

For the full workout, please click the link above!

Tuesday

Man, another rainy day! I decided to take a day off since everything was in pain from either stress or just yesterday’s workout.  I did manage to get the daily challenge done! 50 Lunges each leg! I broke it down into 2 times of 25 each leg during our evening planning for my vacation with my boyfriend.  First few days are generally planned.  Now for the 2nd half!

Wednesday

I really hate to say this but I had to postpone tonight`s workout another day.  I tried to do the daily challenge and it proved that hurting my wrist wasn`t good.  So I did 15 burpees and called it a day to give it some rest.  The daily challenge was to do 50 but I took the better option.  I will try to make up for it on the weekend when there aren`t any daily challenges.

Thursday

My wrist is all better. It just needed a little rest.  I went straight for the doing 3 rounds of the new workout St. Tropez We`re On Our Way.  You will see the exercise on the left.  It was a full body workout that was pretty intense.  It had awesome warmup exercises, same as the ones I use for dragonboat and followed through with some double duty moves that was really fun.  In between of each round and then 2 times with a 2 minute break in between, I did my daily challenge of 5 times of 2 minute planks.  The last one really killed!

Friday

Since I missed out the awesome tough combo workout day on Wednesday and I wasn’t in the mood for the workout they had planned, I decided to do 2 rounds of Pura Vida workout.  For the daily challenge, it was to do 20/20/20 TIU Tummy Tucks.  I can’t do them midday but I sure can get it in during the morning before work.  Then I snuck them in before and after my workout.  These still get painful to do by the 3rd set but at least I feel that my strength as improved so I have better muscular endurance.  A step in the right direction! 🙂

Saturday

Today was crazy! The weather being perfect helped motivate me to go crazy cleaning for a good part of the morning.  Eventually at 2pm, I managed to take a break and do a cardio workout from FitSugar.  I’ve been wanting to try out some workouts and simples recipes from their site so I found this one HERE!  It starts off with a light cardio warmup then lower body stretch, then jumps into the actual workout with burpees, jump squats, squats, pushups, jump rope, ab work, tricep dips (not in that order). It was totally awesome!

Originally, I had planned on a really long bike ride (like 30 km) but because I got caught in doing chores ( I know its not normal), I ended up waiting for my boyfriend and we walked to do groceries and then we went out for another walk in the evening after dinner 🙂 It was just too beautiful outside to not make the best of it.

Sunday

I took it easy today since my muscles were screaming in pain! My legs were feeling extremely weak from so many days of working out.  I’m seriously considering to lower it to 4 days a week workout.  Sounds about right 🙂

However, I did not just sit around and do nothing.  I ended up doing an hour (and a bit more) of DDR, plus I did some stretching throughout the day to help the muscles.  It was nice to do some indoor cardio and move around!

OVERALL…This week was pretty good.  I managed to get in 5-ish days of workout.  I balanced cardio and strength training.  At this point in time, I can be positive that I won’t reach 100 miles by the end of next week. However, it has upped my normal amount of cardio.  Plus, this week was all about the Abs and I did all the daily challenges and even kind of made up for the burpees by doing some here and there throughout the weekend. My abs are feeling fantastic and starting to look a lot better.  I need to keep pushing hard and adding more cardio, plus focus on full body workouts.

This week, I definitely had the most fun with Brazilian Butt Workout on Monday.  It was only one round and I wanted to cry.  I look forward to the day I can do the full 3 rounds and not have to stop because I couldn’t do the move at all.  One day it’ll get there! Second one was the new workout, St. Tropez.  It felt awesome and its the one that has caused me to feel so much pain in my legs.  However, I did try out the FitSugar cardio workout on Saturday and that one was pretty sweet too.  I can’t choose which one is better but they all fit a different purpose.  Try it out if you’d like 🙂

Oh…one more thing! This week, I rounded up 16.3 miles, tallying up to 72.8 miles done! 27.2 miles to go before I accomplish the 100 miles by summer.  Who knows? Maybe the weather will be in my favor and I’ll manage to get in lots of cardio 🙂 We’ll see, right?

Hope you all had an awesome Monday (even when it doesn’t feel that possible some times)!