Tags
ballet, beachbody, combat, dancing, exercise, kathryn morgan, les mills combat, overreaching, overtraining, running, training update, workout
Recently I’ve begun working out again. The plan was to take it nice and easy – not to hold back while exercising, but to work out in reasonable amounts and keep the duration somewhat reasonable too. I love making plans, but have some… challenges in following them up. Mainly I get carried away and forget that there ever was a plan. Guess what? It happened again.
On Saturday, I had postponed working out enough, and found my trusty Les Mills Combat videos. 45 minutes, about half with weighted gloves, 630 kcal. Aaaand then I found ballet videos by Kathryn Morgan which I just had to try. She’s a former ballerina at the New York City Ballet, and has really good beginner’s classes. Not very expensive either. But the lesson lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes (626 kcal), so it was a bit more than I had planned.
On Sunday, I did the 30 minute program of Les Mills Combat, at 357 kcal. But then I had forgotten to buy something I needed for dinner, so I walked for an hour (460 kcal) to get to the gas station, which was the only thing open. By the time I had come home, I had realised that another beginner’s ballet class had been posted, so I went ahead and did that too (414 kcal).
Since I worked out so much on Saturday and Sunday I had intended to take it easy yesterday. Just getting out of bed had been hard, and I couldn’t make it to dance class anyway. But by the time it had nearly become too late in the evening to exercise, my energy level was through the roof, and I realised that I had to get it out or I would never be able to sleep. I had also eaten FAR too much snacks and needed to burn at least a little. Didn’t have any hopes of exercising it all away.
So I did the 60-minute combat program (Where’s the logic in that, by the way? In danger of overreaching and the first thing I do is that? It was very, very fun though, so even if I was sweating buckets I didn’t have any problems getting through it. After years of Irish dancing I love any workouts with lots of kicks in them, simply because I’m good at them. Ended up at 713 kcal, which I’m very pleased with. And that should have been that, but of course I also had to (as if) do one of the ballet classes again (586 kcal). I was doing the same one that I did on Saturday, but I didn’t feel nearly as tired as when I did it on Sunday. Strange.
Today I am definitely not working out. Usually the problem is getting up and doing the exercise you need to do, but if I find something fun that is also part of a skill I want to learn (such as dancing or combat) I find it hard not to overdo it. Once you overreach it’s hard to get back on track, and it might take a long time before you are able to (not to mention that your weight loss often stagnates), so I try not to overdo things – but I’m very bad at it. I always use my heart rate monitor and polarpersonaltrainer.com, so that I can see when I get closer to overreaching, but so far it seems okay. Barely.
I haven’t really started training for the half marathon in April, but it’s too slippery and rainy outside to be able to run somewhat comfortably. So I am hoping that other types of exercise also helps, particularly since I’ve worked out for two hours or more every day. Time will tell. It’s not the end of the world if I’m not able to finish the race, though it would be great.
Saturday will be my first official run of the year, and the day when I will find out just how much my fitness, or at least my running, has detoriorated over Christmas. More importantly, how much worse my shape is than my running buddy’s. She’s lost quite a bit of weight too. We will see! 🙂