Working Hard???

Well even though I haven't posted in a few days, I have still been busy with my workouts. On Friday I did a 30 minute run and then went to an hour aerobics class. I got a great workout, but my watch was not working with me today. Every once in a while, I have trouble with the watch taking my heart rate correctly. Today it kept saying that I was at 190 beats per minute which is over 100% of my maximun heart rate. I know that it was actually not that high, but since the watch doesn't know that it starts counting calories much faster than it should. Usually I can get a good reading eventually and then I can get my calorie count figured out from there. But, on Friday, it did not want to work with me at all. I eventually took the watch off and stopped trying to get it to work. Sometimes I have to remember that even though I do not have my calorie count, doesn't mean I didn't actually burn the calories.

On Monday, I did my 45 minute step class and 45 minutes of pilates. During step I burned about 275 calories and I burned an addtional 139 calories in pilates. My total for the day was 414. During my pilates class, Miss Mary from daycare came into the aerobics room with Morgan and asked if she was allergic to bees. Morgan got stung by a yellow jacket while she was outside playing. The site was raised just a little bit around where the sting occured, but I'm not allergic so I figured she would be fine. Miss Mary said that she didn't even cry. She just came over to Miss Tammi and told her that her elbow was hurting. I let Morgan sit next to me while I did some pilates and then she wanted to go back to play with her friends. I took her back to daycare and she played for another 20 minutes while I finished up class. By the time I picked her up the swelling had gone down and she was fine. Now, I was lucky that it was Morgan that got stung, because if it had been Kaylee we would have had to go home immediatly!

Today was a very interesting day at the gym. I have a PTA Executive Board meeting today so I was not able to go to my normal class. Since I don't like to miss a day, I decided to get to bed early last night and get up and go to the 5:30 am class today. Can you believe it??? I was actually up and at the gym at 5:30am!!! The class is called BOSU, so they use the BOSU ball thing. This is the piece of equipment that is flat on the bottom and like a ball on the top. It is great for working your core. Sometimes you can use the BOSU and do a step type routine. You can also use it for ab workouts and strength workouts. After a brief warmup and some work with the barbell for the first 15 minutes, we went out into the gym to work on the cardio equipment. This part of the workout was like being on The Biggest Loser! She put each of us on a different machine. We spent about 5 minutes on each machine. I started on a stairclimer at a medium level. After about a minute we had to let go of the machine and push ourselves for the next minute. Then relief for a minute, back to pushing and then back to start. Then we moved on to the next machine. I then did 5 minutes on the elliptical, 5 minutes on another stair climber, followed by the last 15 minutes on a stationary bike. The bike was the toughest. I was working at level 8-9 on the "easy" segments. Then I had to crank it up to 18-19 and stand up on the "hard" segments. During the hard segments, we would take one hand off and then switch to the other hand off. This was extremely hard and the teacher was like Jillian, coming around and making sure you were doing the hard levels. After we finished on the equipment we went back to the aerobics room and finished up with about 10 minutes of abs and stretching. This was a really tough class and I was able to burn 312 calories in just 1 hour! It was good for me to get a different type of workout that my body is not used to. I'm sure I'll be feeling it later and hopefully the scale will reflect it tomorrow. I am trying to get back down to my pre vacation weight!

Good luck with your workouts this week. I'll keep you posted on mine. I'm also working very hard to cut down on one of my new favorite foods! I have started enjoying bread (any kind will do) dipped in olive oil with seasoning. It is the best! I have been telling myself that it is good for me because it is olive oil. Well, at each sitting I was probably taking in close to 2 tblsp of olive oil. I just looked at the olive oil bottle the other day and 1 tblsp is 125 calories!!! Ouch!! So, I'm trying to only have this once a week instead of every day and to keep it to a small amount. I don't need to drown the bread, just get a dab to get the flavor. So, even though we think we are eating healthy, it can be sabotoging our weight loss efforts. So make sure you check those labels now and again.