I have known for a long time now that in order to lose weight that as well as very strictly watching what I eat and drink that I need to work out like a mad woman.
Historically I have hit the gym – I struggle with weight loss without a gym membership. As much as I need to do I hate cardio with a passion. I’m pretty good at making myself do stuff that I don’t want to do – taking my formula for my PKU is a perfect example – but cardio isn’t one of those things.
In the past I have had pretty good results with sticking to weights based training. After all, increasing your muscle mass is absolutely essential in increasing your resting metabolic rate, which is exactly what you want to do if you are looking to burn fat. However, while I have always changed my body shape I have never had great success in reducing my scale weight. Now this is a huge problem for me, because my scale weight bothers me, even if my clothes size is decreasing. I think its from my doctor being difficult over scale weight for years when I was growing up – I’ve always been heavier than I look, even now. So my trend is basically that even when my physical size gets smaller my weight is either steady or creeps up, and I don’t want to be so heavy.
If I’m going to reduce my scale weight as well as change my body shape I really need to find some kind of exercise that I enjoy. I have never been a runner – I have always wanted to be able to run, and I have always wanted to enjoy running, but even with a mega supportive sports by the time I’ve run say 150 or 200m my boobs are killing me, I’m bright red in the face and I sound and look like I’m about to have a heart attack. I’ve been like that as long as I can remember when it comes to running. I can swim, dance… pretty much do anything reasonably consistently except running. So I decided it was high time I found something that I would actually stick with that would get my heart pumping a bit.
I am intending to do a lot of pilates – pilates is excellent for toning and sculpting the body to look long and lean and if you do it consistently it helps with back pain too. But this week I’ve been trying my hand at body balance. Body balance is a mixture of tai chi for relaxation, yoga for flexibility and pilates for strength. Now I freely admit that I walked in to my first body balance class a few days ago thinking that it was going to be a nice and relaxing walk in the park. How wrong I was! Within ten minutes I felt quite warm, my heart rate was well and truly up and was sweating.I felt very challenged even when I was only performing the basic movements. By the end of the hour long session I was literally dripping with sweat (even with the air conditioning!), my heart rate was still up and my limbs were shaking from the workout. I seriously think I got more out of an hour of body balance than I do out of smashing it out on the cross trainer or treadmill.
I did another class today, and having done a workout yesterday incorporating my favourite piece of gym equipment (a bosu – I love doing lunges, push ups and squats on it) I found it really tough, but super satisfying. Again. I was dripping with sweat and my heart rate was just as high as it would be doing a cardio workout. I’m going to keep up doing body balance a couple of times and week and its going to be very, very interesting to see how it, along with diet and weight training, affects my scale weight as well as my shape.
All I know is – I can certainly feel my workout! I’m so sore and damn it feels good
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