Strength in Disney

I'm a total wreck right now...I don't think I've mentioned it much, but I ran the Tough Mudder again this last weekend. The course was longer, harder, and had more obstacles than last year...I promise I'll get a full race report up tomorrow, or whenever the professional action shots get back. For now, this is the best I've got:

Shockingly clean for being 2 minutes past the finish line, but hopefully there will be better pics in the professionals' stash.

Anyway.

I taught strength this morning, and I had hoped that would wake me up some...apparently The Happening is a real and legitimate thing in New England right now, since just about everyone is clawing their eyes out at all the pollen in the air. I hope it's just allergies and not a cold, but it wouldn't shock me either way.

Anyway.

Tonight's workout is a result of several weeks' of in-class shenanigans based on the moves I've been having us do. Remember Dive Bombers? Made me feel like Ariel coming up off the rock wanting to be PART OF YOUR WORLD.

The girl has no upper body muscle...those waves must have helped a lot.

The glider walks made me feel like Ursula:

Terrifying and tentacly. Ick.

So tonight's workout, then, is going to channel a few other Disney gems as well.

Not quite sure how to work this one in. I wish we had hula hoops.

So we've got a few options:

Lion King: 

The Rafiki shake, using off-centered body bar:

Start with presses, then pulse at the top for 30 seconds or whatever. Make sure the bar isn't centered, so one arm is doing more pressing than the other. 

The Simba lunge and press:

Starting on a step, back lunge off the step, holding heavy weight at chest. Come back up and press weight up (like a lion cub), while kicking back leg up behind you.

Hakuna Matata switch lunges:

Just switch lunges, but add the arms in dramatically for comedic effect.

Pocahontas:
The canoe row:

Using the body bar, row. Might be more of a kayak motion. Can add a little hip flexor action by kneeling and coming up with every stroke. Could also add balance by leaning against a balance ball against the wall, in a static squat, while rowing. 

Wingapo: 

Using a light or medium weight, make this motion. Try to keep a straight face. For legs, hold a static squat against a balance ball...make it harder, make it one-legged. 

The Little Mermaid: 
Ariel Dive Bomber (see above)
Ursula Glider walk (see above)
Sebastian Crab walk with toe touch: 

Walk forward, touch hand to toe on each side, walk back. Complain about teenage mermaids and violent chefs. 

Aladdin: 
Magic carpet hover squats: No image for this one, sorry. Basically, come down into a wide squat. Staying the squat, move from side to side, ending up in side lunges on each side. Feet stay stationary.

Whole new world flying shoulder raises: 

Starting out kneeling on haunches, raise up onto just knees, lean forward, and open arms as if flying on a magic carpet. Use light to medium weights and focus on pulling your shoulder blades together while avoiding slapping the guy behind you. 

Rooftop step jump: 

You'll need two steps for this, preferably uneven (one set higher than the other). Place them about 2 feet apart from each other. Starting on one, squat then burst up and jump to the other one, either sideways or forward/back. Alternately, do uneven squat pulses with jumps to next level (ground to small step, step to high step, back down). 

Sleeping Beauty: 
Sleeping abs: 

Start out laying flat on mat, with medium weights grasped at chest.  Raise weights above head as if stretching up. Bring them back towards chest as you raise up from the floor. Once you're in a fully-seated position, open arms in a vertical chest fly, as if you're a princess waking up from a deep slumber. Bring hands back to chest, roll back to floor, and repeat until the right prince kisses you. 

Fantasia: 
The Broom Walk: 

Grab heavy weights and step up from floor to low step to high step, back down. Walk around, repeat.  Use the same leg to move up each time. Switch leading legs and do another set. 

Conducting Mickey Arm Raise: 

Using light or medium weights, start with arms down, palms out. Make an aggressive "come hither" motion and try to avoid hitting your face in the process. Anchor feet one in front of the other and lean forward/rock back for added movement. 

Stolen hat curl and tricep extensions: 

Using medium weights, squat down, grab the "hat", curl up as you stand up, bring weights above your head and dip them down. Raise arms back up, squat, and bring them back to the floor. Think of it like a REALLY big hat. 

Peter Pan: 
Taking flight: 

Suspiciously like a Superman, this move has you come onto your stomach, preferably on a slow step. Raise legs and arms (out to side of course), and lower. Focus on squeezing glutes and shoulderblades. Add light weights for added challenge. 

Gator Snatch: 

With light weights, put arms out in front as if  to simulate large, angry jaws of death and dismemberment. Open and close said jaws, making sure movement is controlled and slow. Alternate upper arm, either move by move or set by set. 

Walking the plank like a drama queen: 

Holding a single weight in both hands behind your back, step off tall step. Come back up and step off with other foot leading. 

Jungle Book: 
The Heteroquestionable Bear Dance: 

Front kicks with weighted punches. Flop the wrists for extra flair. 

The BearMonkey walk:

Using a resistance band, hook the band under both shoes and  hold the ends with hands. Keep palms facing floor, flex wrists, and anchor feet wide. Keep wrists flexed, come into wide squat, and lumber forward. 

I think that about covers it. I couldn't really find much for Beauty and the Beast, which makes me sad. So on that note, I'll leave you with this:

300

I wish I could say this were my 300th post - that would just be perfect. I wish I could even say it were my 200th post - that I could also make work. However, it's none of the above. This will be post number 183. Boring.

That's ok. Today's strength workout won't be.

Today we're channeling our inner Spartans and rockin' it 300 style.

Show me happy

Truth? I never watched the whole movie. I got the gist of it and then fell asleep. (Don't act so surprised...I fell asleep mid-HP7v2 as well. I can't lay down and watch movies, ever.)

But none of that changes today's workout. Today, we've got sets of 5 exercises, which we will do in reverse ladder style (10 to 1 instead of 1 to 10), repeating 5 reps, for a total of 300 reps per 5 workout set (or 60 reps per action). Make sense?

So for the first set, it'll look like this:
Dive Bombers x10
Pushups x10
Curls x10
Tricep Extensions x10
Shoulder raises x10
...

Dive Bombers x5
Pushups x5
Curls x5
Tricep Extensions x5
Shoulder raises x5

Dive Bombers x5
Pushups x5
Curls x5
Tricep Extensions x5
Shoulder raises x5
...

Dive Bombers x1
Pushups x1
Curls x1
Tricep Extensions x1
Shoulder raises x1


Each set of exercises has a theme: arm death, leg death, ab death, and power death. I have one each extra of leg death and power death in case we get through the first 4 super fast or something.

This is going to be fun. :-D

Google "cackle". I can't make this up. 

Mardi Gras Mayhem

Somehow, I've ended up with a lot of holidays to cover this year. Last week was V Day, I taught the last spin of the year in December, and next month I get to teach on Pi Day. Oh, Leap Day too, I get that one as well.

Today, however, is the best day of the year to all cajun Catholics and partiers everywhere.

Mardi Gras, y'all. It's magical.

You'd never know those proton packs were homemade.

There are a few things in life that are so pre-written as the traditional Bourbon Street Mardi Gras experience. (Given that we were celebrating with my parents and grandparents, it goes without saying that our experience wasn't exactly "pre-written", but bear with me here.)

With that in mind, tonight's workout is designed to make those of us who'll be celebrating at the gym instead of the bar feel more like we're not really missing all that much. Or something.

Mardi Gras Mayhem Workout:

Overall Move	Breakdown
The "Gimme Some Beads Mister" Shirt Lift with Squat Emphasis	Part 1, The arm lift: Imagine she's lifting her shirt, not dumbbells. For beads guys, for beads.  Part 2, The squat emphasis:  Part 3, Combine the moves. No pic for this, just imagine squatting while lifting your shirt over your head, except instead of living a shirt, we're lifting weights.
The "Yeah, sure, I'll give you some beads" enhanced bead throw with back lunge power generator	Part 1, The tricep extension:  She totally stole my workout outfit. Brat. Part 2, the back lunge: Like a front lunge, but the arrows point differently Part 3, combine the moves. Back lunge with arms overhead and dumbbells down against your back. Explode up onto one leg, flinging beads dumbbells forward, except not really because I want beads, not a concussion.
The Barroom Shuffle	Part 1, keeping the drinks out of harm's way.       Grab your light weights (or heavies, if you're dreaming of Hurricanes) and brace your feet about shoulder width apart. Keeping palms facing up, raise your arms out in front of you, then out to the sides. Bring them back to the center and down again. Sort of like what she's doing with her arms, not her legs. Also, "waitress arm lift" does not return the results you think it would. Geesh. Part 2, Quick feet. Keeping your feet a little bit wider than shoulder width, come down into a wide squat. Without letting your knees track over your toes, come up onto your toes and shuffle side to side a few steps.  Part 3, Sobriety Test. Combine the moves: come down into the squat and shuffle, with your arms raising front and to the sides as you shuffle. Remember to keep the motion smooth, since your sobriety depends on you making it back to the table without spilling too much.
Grabbing a Table at Cafe du Monde	Part 1, throwing some 'bows into it. Grab a resistance band and hold it out in front of you, about shoulder width and height. One arm at a time, keeping your arms parallel to the floor, pull back like you're elbowing someone's poor grandmother for the last table at Cafe du Monde. Keep the other arm out straight, to keep the space you've burrowed in the crowd open.  Part 2, moving forward. With a commanding stomp, plant your foot in front of you and come down into a walking lunge. Explode off the back leg like you mean it - take no prisoners.  Part 3, parting the crowds. Combine the moves. Lunge like you mean it and throw the opposite 'bow as you come down. The same foot and arm should be coming forward at the same time, for maximum crowd damage.
The Drunken Walk Home	Part 1, dropping stuff. With medium weights, place your feet wider than shoulder width apart. Reach down with your right hand to your left ankle, then come back up, pulling the dumbbell to your chest. Repeat on the other side, because dang if you're not just dropping stuff everywhere.  Part 2, the wobble. A crossover lunge fit for a Rex.  Part 3, the drop n wobble. Crossover lunge, bend down to pick up that thing you dropped. Continue walking forward, dropping and wobbling across the room.
Crawling into Bed	Nothing complex here - just a pilates pushup. Start at the top of your mat, walk your hands out, pushup, walk your hands back. Grab some weights for a press at the top if you want added pain.
The "I drank too much and now I need to get out of bed" abs spectacular	Part 1, the first attempt. Starting in a supine (laying down, for all you non-soon-to-be-PTs out there...yeah I know big words, what?) position, arms above your head, come up into a pike. Realize that's not quite the way to get out of bed and flop back down to start over. Repeat several times.  Part 2, crossed wires. Starting supine again, laying spread eagle, bring your right hand to your left ankle, straight above your head. When that doesn't work, try the other way. Repeat until you give up.  Part 3, making progress. Plant your feet on the ground and come up into a seated position. Lean back a little and grab a weight. Get confused about which side of the bed to use. Twist back and forth in indecision. Stop, decide to lay back down, but get only halfway before realizing you still need to pee. Start twisting again.  Part 4, let sleeping crabs lay. Flop back down onto your back again. Do this:  Flop back down to the bed and give up entirely.
Sleep it off	cool down and stretch, all that.

Gotta run to the gym now. Enjoy!

Howdy from the Gym

So this is what NH looks like right now:

The colors go from yellow to red highest to lowest...number of people who still have power. Without getting too specific, suffice it to say, I live in a red zone. I also work in a red zone. The gym is in a light orange zone, and right next to the airport, so they have power. So that's where I am right now. At the gym, chillin' and mooching off the wifi. w00t.
This has been hanging out over our street for 2 days as well:

Except now it's low enough to scrape my car's roof. Not that I've tried, but I can speculate. Frightening.

In related news, I spent a couple hours at the mall this morning and splurged on a pair of super comfy "roll down lounge pants".  Maybe it's just because I'm retaining water, but I feel like the label should have said "now with 20% more jiggle!" Seriously, I've never had a pair of pants make me feel fatter...and these aren't even tight! Go figure.

I'm wondering how tonight's class is going to go...I figure it's either going to be completely empty or completely packed. I'm obviously hoping for the latter, but I'm not sure. We'll see. Leanne asked me to sub her class tomorrow night (I subbed her Wednesday night class last week, you may recall), so I guess none of her regulars called her to tell her how awful I was or anything. So that's good. I'll bring my Jillian DVDs with me to the gym tomorrow to come up with a new class. Tonight, I'm using the same workout I did last week, but with another 2 sets of stuff. Or maybe I'll just go through everything twice. Or maybe I'll tell everyone we're having an imagination class, turn out the lights, lay down on my mat, and guide them through a walk on the beach. Who knows.

Wednesday Night Strength Plan and Spin Playlist

Good news is, since none of the Wednesday night regulars have come to my Monday night class (except one I guess...5 weeks ago), I can reuse the best moves from previous weeks. I'm only picking the hardest ones because that's what they expect when they come to Leanne's class...gotta live up to that reputation! :-)

So to that end, we're going to be doing sets of 3 exercises tonight, with sets of 5 push ups at the end of each set. Should be awful.

Equipment needed:

Medicine ball, mat, 2x body bar, heavy weights, resistance band, light/medium weights

Single leg squats
4 squats w/arm lifts
Twist & touch balance
Side planks w/dumbbells

Windshield wipers

Donkey kicks w/resistance bands
Skiers
Warrior lift with body bar
Body bar side lunge w/bicep curl (touch body bar to floor w/each lunge)
Medicine ball or body bar surrenders
Medicine ball throws (onto mat)
Static squat w/dumbbell halo
Superman
Hollow man w/scissor kicks
Russian twists w/medicine ball

---

Anyway, that's tonight's workout. 20 or so of each, per set, depending on how I'm feeling and how everyone else looks.

The playlist for the spin class is this:


Fela Kuti - Zombie   
She's Not There - The Zombies
Disturbia - Rihanna
Shake Senora - Pitbull Ft. T-Pain
Living Dead Girl - Rob Zombie
The Time Warp - Rocky Horror Picture Show
Candyman - Christina Aguilera
Beautiful Monster - Ne-Yo
Kernkraft 400 - Zombie Nation
Paint It Black - Vanessa Carlton
Glee - Thriller-Heads Will Roll HQ   
No More Gas - DJ Earworm
Arrogant Worms - The Last Saskatchewan Pirate
Pink Elephants - Daladubz
Somebodys Watching Me - Rockwell
Monster - Paramore

Awkward Turtle, Or: Calling My Bluff

Source

Just borrowing that one from Cardiogirl. Love the idea and bonus, I just found a new blog to get hooked on. :-)

Anyway.

I tried last night you guys, I really did. I actually don't really like walking up to people and asking them to come to my class. I hate it. It adds so much more pressure than it needs to, which makes me that much more prone to workout-induced stupidity, among other things.

About 15 minutes before class, I wandered around the weights area and talked to some women about coming to class. No dice. About 5 minutes after class was supposed to start, Liz walked by with a new member and I poked my head out the door to harass her. I ended up convincing him to come to my class...like, right then.

He was the only one who came.

Bless Deb's heart, she stayed too, so it wouldn't be completely awkward. I love that girl, she's so sweet. I should do something nice for her.

I had my mat set up at the front of the room as usual, and this guy decided  the best place for his mat was literally 6 inches from mine.

Awkward.

At least he smelled good. And I guess that's better than setting up camp in the back of the room like I smell funny (do I??) I ended up doing a half hour class so he could get back to signing his soul away to Executive, and it was...ok. I was thrown off because he was clearly very new to group ex, so I wanted it to be a positive experience...so my previous class plan got a little mushed up and I wound up paying a lot more attention to how much he was grunting than I probably should have. Oh well. I'm sore today, so I guess that's what matters.

Wednesday night I'm teaching strength again, before teaching the Zombie Ride. I'm super excited about the Zombie Ride. I've waited all year to revive this little gem. I'll be teaching it again on Saturday morning as well.

What's a Zombie Ride? Well, since you asked...

The premise is that the zombie apocalypse has come and we're all survivors. The problem is, we're all out of food and need to get to the grocery store (the only one that hasn't been looted into oblivion). Naturally, the roads are clogged and we're out of gas anyway, so we need to take our bikes. Now, the nature of the zombie virus is that it causes a slightly elevated metabolism, so the infecteds' heart rates are in the 75-80% (or 80-85, if you want to make it a strength ride) range. In order to get to the grocery store safely, we need to make sure our heart rates stay strictly within that range - if they go lower, the zombies will know we're uninfected and will eat us; if they go higher, they'll think we're infected but in the "dying" stage of the disease, and again...they'll come to eat us.

It's easy to have fun with this one - there's a big gang of zombies coming towards you, pick up the cadence; we need to take a detour through someone's yard, add resistance; they left the sprinklers on, add even more resistance. At the grocery store, take the resistance off, but pick up the cadence to 90-100 RPM to simulate running through and grabbing our supplies as quickly as possible. Then on the way home, make sure resistance is slightly higher than on the way back - this time we've got a load on our bikes, so we're slower.

Terrifying.

I'm super excited. 

Monday Strength

I'm not sure who's coming tonight, but it's COLD today, so hopefully there'll be more than just me and Deb in there this week. Here's the list of stuff I'm hoping to work into some kind of reasonable order to do tonight:

Plank with row
Superman
Hollow man with scissors
Figure 4 bridge
Side plank dynamic
Side plank leg lift
Inner thigh lift
Donkey kicks
Fire hydrant with kicks
Surrender - hold weights above head, step back, onto knees, step back up. Alternate legs
Static lunge w/triceps presses
Chair squat w/triceps presses
Plank twists
Plank side taps
Windshield washers
Up/up down/down planks
Plie squat jumps
Pike crunch
Dumbbell cleans

Lotta mat work tonight.

I won't lie, I'm still a little sore about how last week's staff meeting went down, but I won't get into it here. Grumble grumble bygones.

This weekend was productive to the nth degree. We replaced ALL the siding on the backyard side of the house, which was no trivial task. Here's the before picture:

The color on the left is the new color. Notice all the vertical siding (seriously, who does that??) and rotted boards. Super fun.

Got to the bathroom window and the trim was attached to the siding. Went to remove the trim and took THE WHOLE WINDOW OUT OF THE WALL. My bad. Turns out it was nailed into the trim as well. Special.

A better look at some of the rot. It turned out there was a lot of rotted sheathing under the rotted siding, so hubs ended up having to do a lot more prep work than anticipated, which wasn't fun on Friday night.

All the siding off (95% of it removed by yours truly!), waiting for rot repairs.

My awesome husband working his butt off the night before our "replace our siding" party to get things ready.

Who needs blinds with a view like this??

They decided windows are overrated, so they just covered them up. Yeah yeah, it's upside down. :-P

DONE!! I couldn't believe they got the whole side done in one day! My friend and I went out to get our hair did, and when we came back they had maybe 3 more rows to do! Amazing!

Before and after. I'll be painting it this coming weekend (fingers crossed we won't get snow before then...ugh). 

How was your weekend??

Halloween Strength Class

So this is what I came up with for a flyer for my class. We'll see if my manager will go for it.

Body Bar Workout

Tonight I'm going to play with the body bars a lot I think. And the balance balls. We'll do some of this:

And this:

And a little of this:

This:

Umm...not this: 

Because I can't balance on a ball like that. Not yet anyway.
This:

Is totally doable, as is this:

Source.

In that last position, we might also do chest presses. Might also add in some kind of sit up/crunch with a twist thing, with the bar behind our heads.

I really like the moves this guy has too:
That skier position may be making an appearance tonight. The mopping one too. That's beautiful. I'll have to see how many people there are and if we can snag some plates from the outside area.

This looks like a good move for the end of class maybe:


I love that this guy is clearly working out near a playground at recess, and somehow that's not creepy at all:


But I'm also thinking about throwing in a couple of tabatta segments tonight...anyone done these before? Maybe I'll have the skiers be dynamic (moving legs back and forth) and make that the cardio. And I'll be immune because someone has to time it, right? :-D

So yeah. That's tonight.