Just When You Think You're in Decent Shape . . .
Holy crap . . . I did my first "Slim in Six" workout this morning. YIKES! So I've been doing the elliptical pretty regularly for about a month now and was feeling like I was in pretty good shape. I was getting bored though, so I wanted something to mix it up a bit, so I ordered "Slim in Six" from beachbody.com. A couple of friends had done it and recommended it, so I picked it up. When I got it on Friday, I cruised through the video on my laptop just to see what I was in for. I thought "Yeah, I'm going to sweat a bit, but nothing looks TOO hard in there". Oh the things we tell ourselves . . . Well today was day 1 of my 6 day a week, 6 week workout plan. I got up around 6AM and weighed myself on our new body fat % scale. Then I went downstairs and Teri and I measured my body. Yeah, so far, the day isn't comin' up all roses. I skipped the obligatory "Before" photos, I'll do those tomorrow. All the measurements will be posted in my exercise section if you've got a strong stomach, head on over.Yesterday I mounted our new 26" LCD TV to the wall in the bonus/exercise room. This morning I hooked a DVD player up to it. I grabbed the Yoga mat that Teri had purchased for me at GI Joes over the weekend out of my trunk, got some water and popped the DVD in.
The program consists of 3 increasingly difficult workouts. The first is "Start it Up". It's about 25 minutes. Now, I've been doing 45 minutes on the elliptical without much issue, so I figured 25 minutes will be a piece of cake. The next two workouts are called "Ramp it Up" and "Burn it Up", I can only imagine what those will be like. They add time and intensity to your workouts. Anyway, the "Start it Up" starts by doing some moves to just get the blood flowing a bit. Honestly, I had trouble keeping up with the warmup. I think it was about 5 minutes long and I actually had to take a short rest somewhere in there. From there, you go into some more difficult moves like lunges, squats, etc. Finally they have you do some pushups and the final 5 minutes or so is devoted to abdominal exercises. Reverse crunches, oblique crunches and standard crunches. A couple minutes for stretching and you're done.
I made it through, but I certainly did not look as smooth as the models on the screen did! I took a couple extra rests in between exercises and when I was done, I was actually shaking. I really felt the burn in my quads and my abs. It is definitely something different. It's challenging, but not so much that I will dread doing it . . . I'm looking forward to "Start it Up" becoming "easy" so I can move on to "Ramp it Up". I was hoping to get through all three workouts by wedding day, but I don't know that I'll be that far along by then. This was a wakeup call for me. I'm not nearly as studly as I thought I was, but I will be!