Sweat + Shape

I met my old friends today - pain and suffering.  But I had another old pal to make it bearable - endorphins.

Since I got here, I have not really done any serious work outs.  Pete has been asking me to train him as well but we have not done any exercise apart from our daily walks.  The reasons are quite simple actually.  I wanted to enjoy the first few days of Sweden, and you know how food plays a huge part in my enjoyment.  I have been sampling the goodies here like their pastries and potato salads and I have been cooking more goodies at home for my darling Pete who has had to subsist on fish sticks and hamburgers before I got there.  Also, I am afraid that if I were to start too soon, his bum leg would not be able to handle it. 

But the daily walks have done some good to increase his fitness and also to get his legs more used to exercise.  And I am ready to ditch those fattening foods.  Ok, well, maybe not ditch., who am I kidding?  That's too drastic and frankly, impossible.   There are still lots of food I would love to eat more of but I know that I can pace myself.  Should pace myself actually.  And Pete is ready as well.

So today we decided to have our first work out.  I downloaded an awesome app called Nike Training Club or NTC a few months ago.  A friend of mine introduced me to it actually.  It's awesomeness times 10 since it is totally free.  What you get is a series of workouts designed to suit your fitness goal and level. For each goal, there are three fitness levels.  And for each level, there are quite a few workouts to choose from.

The workouts range from 30 to 45 minutes and they are all circuit training style.  Most of the workouts do not require the use of equipment and if they do, it's usually some basic exercise mat, skipping ropes, hand weights and medicine ball.  And if you don't have any equipment, you can do without.  The best part is that all exercises come with step-by-step instructions with pictures or if you're linguistically challenged or if you're a visual learner like me, there are videos too.  How awesome is that?!

The workouts consist of a number of exercises which are to be done for a specific interval such as 15sec, 30sec, 1min or 2min.  The most awesome part is that the timing is all done for you.  A mechanical voice (she is the only un-awesome part of the app) will tell you what exercise to do, how long to do it for, how much time you have left for the exercise and occasionally, will give you some encouragement.  This feature of the app is awesome, I must admit, but the way she speaks, it's a bit umm..mechanical.  But it's still good.

So, my friends who are fitness freaks, or if you are thinking of starting a fitness routine and you are not a member of any gym like us, try this out.  Oh yeah, you need to get an iPhone first.  I'm not sure if you can get it on android but those with, you can give it a try.

So for our first work out, I decided to try out a Get Lean workout for beginners.  The workout is called Sweat + Shape.  It's supposed to start out with 5 minutes of warm up with light jogging for 2 mins, back pedalling for a minute and 2 mins of straight leg kicks.  First off, we already have a problem.  We live on the 3rd floor and so we do not wish to make too much noise, lest we cause some disturbances to our neighbours below.  Imagine us, two heavyweights ´running and jumping about.  I'm so sure we'd drive our neighbours mad with our thud, thudding.

We also do not have a lot of room to maneuver.  We only had maybe 2m by 3m of space, so imagine how we had to squeeze by each other.  Between moving about to get out of each other's way and trying to tip toe so as not to make too much noise, the 4th minute of the workout got us panting much harder than I expected.

I am so sure that if we were to get our attempts at the exercises on video, it would be a hit on Comedy Central.  But we plodded on.  The exercises, though labelled as for beginners, were not too easy.  I have not been working out since my wedding back in March so I am out of shape and oh how I struggled!  I had to do those all too familiar squats, lunges, push ups and planks but it's good cause muscle memory got my breathing and form correct and soon, after the initial struggle, I was feeling good.  That was the endorphins talking.  It was tiring, very tiring, and I was sweating and my muscles are aching, but I love that feeling.

Pete did good too.  He has not been doing those exercises for a long time too, much longer than me, and coupled with his injury, he had to struggle even more to get through the workout.  The accident impaired the mobility of his left knee and he had trouble with the lunges and squats.  But he pressed on.  He wanted to quit after just half of the workout but to his credit he took just a short breather and then continued, joining me for the rest of the workout.

I could see it in his face that he was really putting in a lot of effort.  I have never seen his face getting that red nor his breathing so heavy but he really pushed himself.  I am so proud of him, prouder still when he asked, "So we're doing this every day?"

My initial plan was to do circuit training 3 or 4 times a week on top of our daily walks.  I think that would be a great start.  We can increase the intensity if it gets too easy but I think I'll be happy if we can keep to the plan.

After the workout, or 'torture' is what Pete likes to call it, we drank a bit of water and then we were out the door on our usual walk.  Our vegetable garden awaits.