Why do most people quit things? Either one: it gets too hard, or two (and most likely): they get bored. I was talking to my cousin tonight about how she hates the time she puts in on her elliptical machine at home and it got me thinking...I rarely go down to the gym, get on the elliptical or treadmill, and slave my time away. Why? Because I think that's boring. It might not be to some people, but it sure is to me. That's why I rarely do it. One thing I learned early on in this journey is that if something was boring or seemed like drudgery, the less I liked it, the less I would push myself, and the more I would dread it. Dread something often enough and you'll stop doing it, that's why it became pretty clear to me that I was going to have to get creative with my workouts and also constantly switch them up.
One easy way to do that is by taking classes. This week we started Monday off with a challenging Sculpt class that left every major muscle group shaking with exhaustion. Wednesday was our usual Step class that has been getting increasingly harder as the class's experience grows. Marisa, our teacher, is throwing more complicated choreography at us and at one point I was convinced she was preparing us to become a touring dance troupe. It was challenging but, because 99% of us have been doing that class for quite some time, we're ready to step it up. Sure we were shaking our heads, going in the wrong direction at some point, and even running into each other, but by the time Marisa had said, "Let's take it from the top in one, two, three.." for what seemed like the fiftieth time, we had gotten the routine and everyone's faces, though red and sweaty, had the expression kids get when they finally get Algebra for the first time.
Tuesday found us in the group exercise room looking around at each other with blank faces and no plan of what we wanted to do. Luckily, Amy had "Insanity" in her bag and thus became my first experience with that hard series of workouts. It made me think back to when I first started working out and would observe the girls, who would eventually become my friends and workout buddies, head into the room to do "Insanity". I would shake my head, convinced that I'd never be capable of doing it. My how times have changed!
Today I had something new for my girls...a plan that later became known as Workout Poker. What it consists of is this: you utilize a pack of playing cards and each suit represents a different body weight exercise and the number on the card reflects how many times you have to do it. Then, each face card represents a different cardio exercise that you do for thirty seconds at a time. To the jokers you assign a really hard exercise that engages the whole body and you do it for five repetitions. Once you have the exercises assigned (and you want to make sure to hit the arms, legs and core) you simply deal the cards one at a time and work your way through the entire deck as fast as you can, taking as few breaks as possible. It ends up being close to six hundred reps not counting the cardio portions. All in all, one heck of a workout that feels like a game. Even if you don't change the exercises each time you do it, you never have the same workout.
It's all about keeping things varied, fun (my girls all shudder when I say something is "fun" these days), and challenging. You can use google and your creativity to make this happen for yourself or attend a class and let the pros do the thinking for you. Or, like us, you can do a little bit of both. Keeping things different every day ensures that you have fun, get seriously cross-trained, and achieve muscle confusion so that your body doesn't get used to what you're doing. Save the same boring treadmill workout for hamsters on their wheels and think outside the box!
