5 Weeks of Boot Camp

Tomorrow morning is the first Monday in five weeks that I won’t force myself out of bed at 6:45 AM, hastily throw on some workout clothes, and rush to the park to sweat. I finished my five week Groupon and I’m happy to report that my boot camp was nothing but a positive experience, as it taught me several things:

• While I am certainly not a morning person, getting a great work out before the day begins is awesome. It was done for the day and I went to work feeling nice and awake and stretched out and limber.
• I have lazy tendencies, and need to push myself to work harder when it comes to fitness. My bootcamp instructor was great about encouraging me to do more, and it worked. Sometimes a gentle nudge is all I need.
• Five weeks seems short, but it made A LOT of difference in my fitness regimen. How much? Let’s see!

On the first day of the class, we did baseline fitness testing where for one full minute, we counted the number of crunches, squats, sprints and “six inches” that we could do. Six Inches means you hold your feet and legs off the floor, six inches above the ground, using your core to support you.

Here’s my baseline fitness test next to my scores after five weeks:

I was most proud of my improvements on plank. For some reason, the plank is always the fitness move that eludes me, where I try and try to hoist my body up, teetering on my elbows like a hot dog held up by toothpicks. I’ve finally mastered it, and at the beginning of the five weeks, I thought I was going to die after 15 seconds – and now I can actually hold it up to a minute and 30 seconds. AWESOME!

As you can see above, I improved in every category except for sprints. I am tryiiiiing so hard to like running, but I think I finally hit the nail on the head for why it’s not uber enjoyable for me. It’s HARD to move this body, with an extra 70 pounds. I am agile, flexible and strong, but I am not FAST – and that’s so much of what running seems to be. However, I recognize that it’s an amazing cardio element, so I’m going to try to keep it up.

All in all, after five weeks of bootcamp, I lost 9 inches over all and greatly improved my fitness. I’m already debating signing up again because it felt so much more rewarding for me than my gym. As much as I love Zumba and boxing, this fitness regimen really got me movin’ and combined cardio and strength, and I loved being outside in the morning, watching the squirrels find their breakfast, seeing the sun rising up over the smoggy skies of Los Angeles.

As far as weight, I haven’t gotten on the scale since last week’s kerfuffle, but I’ll be back on it soon. When I’m done with school, I have an appointment with my doctor, just to double check that hormonally, everything is right. Sometimes you just have a feeling something’s wrong, and I want to just double check. In reflecting back, losing weight has been about 94% impossible for me the past year, so I just need to confirm that it’s all good in the hood and it’s likely behavior (food) and not physiology (hormones) that’s making this so challenging.

Anyhoo! So that was bootcamp! I surprisingly loved it.

I hope you have a fantastic Monday – I’ll be back tomorrow!