Tough Workout This Morning

Today was the kind of workout that makes you really happy when you're finished, but the entire time you are doing it your brain is trying to come up with excuses to stop.

It did not help that we were under a time crunch, so I could not dawdle - - we were expecting the Matriarch's call to go shopping around 9:30 am, so I needed to push my workout from one element directly to the other with as little time lost as possible (and as little rest as possible) in between so as to be ready when the call came. 

This meant that I went directly from 45 minutes on the elliptical to 30 minutes on the treadmill for W1D3 of my C25K program, then right back to the elliptical machine for a 20 minute cool down. 

Maybe it was feeling the time crunch an not taking more than a minute's rest in between the different elements, but this morning's workout was just plain grueling.  I didn't want to start the C25K program at all, and then all the way through I had to force myself to keep going through the running intervals.  Today was another 8 minutes of running broken into 1 minute intervals with 1.5 minutes of walking in between and I knew that I could do it, but man, it was tough this morning.  I basically psyched myself up 8 times before each interval, telling myself that I could do it.  I was wobblier than usual with my hands-free running, and had to really focus to bring my running back under control for the last interval.  When I was finished my whole workout, I was just exhausted, completely blown, and dripping with sweat.  Trust me, I looked super glamorous. 

But boy oh boy did it feel good to be done.  And just in time for the Matriarch's call ... cancelling shopping due to dangerous driving conditions.  D'oh!

Tomorrow will be a workout day because I took last Wednesday off (I had to present at a meeting and didn't have enough time to work out).  It will be a weight day, so back to the upper body work.  And then Monday it is back to C25K, week 2.

Still, I feel fantastic now that the workout is done, and the results since I have gotten back on track have been fabulous.  No snacking + tough workouts = weight loss.  I am down another 0.3 pounds from yesterday's low, for a new low of 187.8 pounds.  I sincerely hope that I am done with the 190's forever, because those 10 pounds basically took me 4 months to lose.  

Back to it tomorrow!

I have a plan to fight back against this whole "lower calories burned when you're lighter" thing...

It has been about a month or so since I stepped up my workouts, and now that my routine is feeling comfortable, and given the hit that my workout calories have taken with my new, streamlined weight, it's time to kick things up a notch.  After all, if you don't push yourself, you miss half the fun, right? (and by 'fun', I apparently mean 'sweat', judging by this morning's results).

My most recent workout routine was 3 days x 55 minutes of elliptical at a crossramp of 6 and tension of 5 (or 25%) and a stride rate of 130, plus 8 free weight exercises using 6 pound weights at 4 sets of 12 reps each.  On alternate days the routine is 60 minutes of elliptical at the same settings, without the weights.  I can never decide which is my 'easier' day.  Usually it's whatever day is not the current day.  On Saturdays, my rest day, I have been doing only 30 minutes of elliptical, just to keep things limber.

Over time I have been seeing a constant decrease in the calories burned from my workouts with my declining weight, and that is frustrating to me.  I feel ripped off - - if I am sweating that much (and man, do I ever sweat!), I want to get credit for it.

So I am incorporating a couple of changes to my workouts this week to try and make things a little more challenging, and hopefully kick up the calories a bit.

First, I have purchased a set of wrist/ankle weights.  The set I am getting will be up to 5 pounds per wrist/ankle, with weight able to be added in 1 pound increments.  I intend to start off using the weights on my wrists, and I will likely start light, only 1 pound per arm, just to see how it goes.  By effectively adding weight back, I am increasing the effort required during my workout, and thereby increasing the calories burned.

The second change is to add some faster tempo songs into my workout playlist.  Recently my stride rate has been around 130 strides per minute.  This weekend I added some 140 bpm songs, that will hopefully be sprinkled through the workouts (god forbid they all come one after the other!), and this will kick things up periodically through the elliptical workout.

I do not think I am yet fit enough to do a full 60 minutes at 140 bpm, and to be honest, I just don't have enough songs at that tempo to make up a full playlist.  But I have a few 140 bpm songs, and they should help me to make my elliptical workouts a bit more intense.

I tried the new playlist this morning and noticed that my calories burned had increased, along with my stride count.  I am reluctant to add much more time to my workout, because I do need to work sometime, and it's tough enough to fit an hour to an hour and half of workout into my schedule every workday as it is.

Hopefully the combination of wrist weights and faster pace will allow me to stretch out this routine for another few weeks before it starts getting comfortable again.  I definitely felt challenged this morning, so we'll see how it plays out this week.  Could be a long week...!