A good workout …

Started the Saturday as usual with a shopping trip to the Victoria Market, followed by some carpet shopping (we think our 23 year old carpet is in need of replacement).

Then I did a bit of bike cleaning and maintenance, cleaning it completely and giving it a good lube job after it’s soaking yesterday.

The weather was pretty shocking and really cold, and I couldn’t face exercising outside, so I decided to do a workout at home, but to make it a serious one. I am guilty too often of making my home workouts a bit lackadaisical so decided to try and push myself a bit harder and longer today as it was going to be my only exercise for the day.

The format I decided on was 5 minutes of fairly high intensity work on the exercise bike, followed by 25 pushups, followed by 25 sit-ups, followed by 3 or 4 mixed exercises (core, swiss ball, free weights, squats, lunges etc). This pattern was repeated 6 times, taking just over an hour.  I was pretty hot, sweaty (and smelly) at the end, so I guess it was a pretty good workout.

I put some high energy music on my iPod before I started and this really helps me get the cardio going on the exercise bike. I find the heart rate really gets going if I take my hands off the handlebars. It usually starts of as a sort of running motion with the arms, but depending on the music usually ends up being more like a mixture of a crazy dance, air guitar and imaginary drumming. Lots of fun, until someone else wanders into the room and thinks you are a loon.

I think I am officially going to drop the 100 Pushups Challenge. Don’t get me wrong, it has been great – before I started it I would barely do one set of ten in my home workouts, tonight I did 6 sets of 25. However, I cannot see myself getting past week 5, and also cannot see myself doing the consecutive 100. So, whilst I will keep pushing the push-ups in my home workouts, I think the challenge is officially over for me.

Now, Sara, I don’t know what your physio is into, but being as I am not as sensible as you, I did do that Google search you mentioned in your comment yesterday. To try and avoid the obvious unwanted results, I did search on the suggested search term in conjunction with the word “bicycle”, but was sadly unable to find the device your physio suggested may be helpful. I did find one bicycle related website, but even this was mildy shocking and made someone of my sheltered disposition blush deeply