My Journey With Health And Fitness – Getting Toned

I kind of surprised myself this morning. I upped my interval training to sets of 5 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking. I was dreading this a bit as I thought it would be difficult. Much to my surprise I was absolutely ready for it. Don’t get me wrong, by time I was done I was covered in sweat and felt like I had done a good workout (most of it in cardio zone) but at no point did I feel like I wanted to quit. Instead I just kept thinking, I got this. I realize that within the next couple weeks my endurance training is going to be doing 6km runs and quite frankly I am really looking forward to it.

One of the things I have done over the past several weeks is that I have gone back to doing strength training at least 5 days a week. I really don’t know why I had stopped other than apparently I had really gotten myself into a bad head space where I had lost all of my motivation. But I have been pretty diligent since I started back on my fitness journey and it is starting to show.

I admit, despite my bad behaviors my arms hadn’t lost all of the muscles I had developed, they had just receded a bit. But I have kept up with doing my weights recently, going back to all the sets I used to do before I got lazy. Yesterday I looked in the mirror and was surprised by how toned my arms are looking again. The muscles have become nicely defined and I am confident now that they will be back to where I had them before within the next few weeks. If I keep at it by time I get to the condo the end of April I will once again have really buff arms.

I have also noticed that I can feel my ab muscles again. Part of my strength routine is working on my core. This involves doing modified crunches (modified by my PT to protect my spine but give my abs a good workout) as well as bridge exercises. For the bridges I make sure I hold the position for at least 3 seconds and during that time I am keeping my abs and gluts tight. My husband keeps telling me my butt is looking better each day so it must be working.

The strange thing about all of this is how I am once again really enjoying the transformation that I am seeing. Funny, it is like what happened 2 years ago when I decided to push myself to lose even more weight past my original goal. I am motivated, I feel great, I am loving how I am starting to look and most importantly I am proud every time I kick it up a notch and get through tough workouts.

Bottom line, my head is so back in the right place and my body is working on getting there as well.