Kickboxing Chic’s BodyBlog

Yesterday’s decision to take an unplanned rest day was a good call. Taking yesterday as a day to re-group has me feeling much better today, both physically and psychologically. I had a much better night’s sleep last night too. Miraculously, my 11 week old daughter slept through the night. I got her up at 5:00am to feed her because my left boob was about to burst. After that… workout time! I need another week of nights like that to be feeling 80% (a level I can live with). I was planning to get up at 5:00am to train anyway, so my day was off to a better start than I had even planned.

The only minor glitch in today’s plan was with my workout itself. I did a metabolic circuit (my new favorite thing). It was a little too much. It took me 80 minutes to complete, and I was jammin’ through it. Because it took that long, it was probably physically too much as well. It was a great workout overall; I just need to scale it back a bit.

I’ve finalized my planned diet deviations for this week. The first of which happened yesterday. My husband and I went out to lunch (Mexican). I made the best possible choices, but it still didn’t align with my rules. The time was more about our relationship, which is more important than any diet rule. Aside from the 12 hours he was home Thursday night to Friday morning between his two trips, I hadn’t seen him in a week. So well worth breaking the rules.

My “finalized” planned deviations for the week (10%):

1. (Friday) A Hispanic pastry during my Friday trip to the local grocery store. I will only have this if they have my favorite one.

2. (Friday/Saturday) Wine Friday and Saturday nights, 1-2 glasses each night. I’ve learned that if I have any more than 2 glasses, it screws up my sleep. So I will definitely be sticking to the limit here.

3. (Sunday) Easter dinner – Not sure what’s on the menu, but I’m sure it won’t be according to my rules. However, I’m going to stick with the healthier options as much as possible. Dinner is with my family so I know it won’t be too bad. Plus, I’ll be contributing to the menu and my contributions will be healthy options that are within my rules.

4. (Monday) Lunch at Jalisco’s Mexican restaurant with my husband.

One more final exciting note about today… the ad for my favorite ghetto grocery store comes in today’s mail. The grocery store is nothing fancy and in many ways caters to lower income clientele. HOWEVER, their produce is awesome and the prices unbelievable. They don’t carry the biggest selection of lean meats, but flank steak is usually a great deal. This is the same grocery store I get my weekly Hispanic pastry treat. So when the mail man comes today, I will be “sprinting” out there to see what’s on sale this week.

After a week of running solo as a parent and crappy sleep, I’ve reach a point of physical exhaustion. As much as I want to do my strength training workout today (delts… my favorite!), I need to have a day of rest. It frustrates me and pisses me off when I get to this state because I can’t execute my plan as I had planned it. I’m the type that MUST stick to my plan in order to feel successful. If I have unplanned deviations, I get frustrated and mad. But today is one of those days I need to be flexible and be OK with it. I know if I gave it a go, it would be a mediocre workout and I’d be even more frustrated and pissed off. Then I’d be in a bitchy mood all day, which is not good for my relationship with my kids or husband (who just got back after being gone for a week). This has happened many times before. So today I will focus on the other aspects of my fitness plan: rest/recovery, nutrition, and planning out a solid training plan for the week.

Since my 11 week old daughter was up at 5:15am and my 4 year old at 6:30am today, I at least had some time to think about my plan at a high level.

Training
Monday: Rest/Recovery and Planning/Prep Day; light activity (going for a walk or something)

Tuesday: Strength Training and HIIT Cardio

Wednesday: Metabolic Circuit Training

Thursday: Strength Training

Friday: Indoor Cycling Class

Saturday: Boot Camp/Semi-Rest Day

Sunday: Metabolic Circuit

I like to have a rest day planned in the middle somewhere. But since today is a full rest day, hopefully I’ll be better prepared physically to handle Tuesday – Thursday. I won’t go too crazy during indoor cycling and will focus more on the “instructing” part of boot camp instead of the “doing” part. Hopefully I can catch up on some sleep too… it has to!

Nutrition
After evaluating my new nutrition “rules” last week, I’ve made some tweaks. My body needs more starch carbs and less vegetables. I’m too bloated and hungry with only 2 starch carbs servings per day. I’ll add another half serving of starch carbs and less veggies and see how that goes this week. So I’ve really only changed rule #3 and clarified rule #2 with the types of protein.

My rules to follow 90% of the time:

Rule #1: Eat every 2.5-3 hours. This equals 3 meals and 2 snacks per day.

Rule #2: All meals need 20-25 grams of protein and fruit or veggies. I will have fruit with my snacks and veggies with my meals. Protein needs to come from lean meats, fish, and low fat dairy.

Rule #3: Starch carbs 2.5 times per day. One of which must be post-workout. Starch carbs are limited to oatmeal, yams, and brown rice.

Rule #4: Drink bodyweight in ounces of water. Right now that’s about 125 ounces/day. This includes a big mug of green or peppermint tea which I have on a daily basis.

Rule #5: Take a multi-vitamin and Omega-3 fish oil.

My planned deviations for the week (10%):

1. A Hispanic pastry during my Friday trip to the local grocery store. I will only have this if they have my favorite one.

2. Wine Friday and Saturday nights, 1-2 glasses each night. I’ve learned that if I have any more than 2 glasses, it screws up my sleep. So I will definitely be sticking to the limit here.

3. Easter dinner – Not sure what’s on the menu, but I’m sure it won’t be according to my rules. However, I’m going to stick with the healthier options as much as possible. Dinner is with my family so I know it won’t be too bad. Plus, I’ll be contributing to the menu and my contributions will be healthy options that are within my rules.

4. TBD – I’m having dinner out with a friend and her kids this week, so that may be my 4^th. Or maybe something if my husband and I go out today.

The one thing I’m going to really try not to do is have Easter candy. So far I’ve been successful with this. Especially since I love those damn marshmallow Peeps! Thankfully I can only tolerate 1-2 at a time.

Ok, I’m done with my Pitty Party about not being physically prepared to workout today. I know rest/recovery is the smarter move today. I learned that last Saturday, when I should have rested, and other times in the past when a rest day made all the different. I’ll check back in tomorrow or Wednesday.

I changed my training plan for this week by swapping Wednesday and Thursday. The Metabolic Circuit I did on Tuesday beat me up pretty good, so I did the right thing and made Wednesday a rest/recovery day. I did about 20-25 minutes of stretching, which felt really good. So today was my second strength training workout of the week. Instead of a HIIT cardio session at the end, I decided to do 4 sets of each superset. I may be over-doing the cardio. My upper body was DEAD after today’s workout… I could barely hold the hair dryer to dry my hair! My arms should really be wiped by the end of the day after carrying around a baby all day. This is why moms have buff arms. Here’s a quick rundown of today’s workout:

It felt like a high school BF/GF relationship all over again. You may be familiar with the ‘break-up-on-Monday-get-back-together-on-F
riday-at-the-football-game’ scenario that often occurs in teen relationships. It kind of felt like that last week when I temporarily broke-up with training. I’ve known for a while now that many of my fatigue/exhaustion issue, sleeping challenges, and other aches and pains are due to being over-trained. It was so bad the other week that I decided that I needed to take off more than one or two days. So I took off 4 days IN A ROW! I hadn’t done that since giving birth to my son. At which point I started easing myself back into the gym after 2 weeks. On Monday, I told training I needed to temporarily “break-up” with you. Then on Friday we got “back together”. So what did I learn during this 4 day break-up:

1.       I could actually commit to the time off without going crazy or giving in. Early in the week I did try to negotiate with myself that if I took off Monday and Tuesday, I could do something light on Wednesday. But I did not give in to my 4 day commitment.

2.       Sleeping problems are indeed a sign of over-training. I did actually sleep better by day 2. That is, I slept more soundly and did not wake up several times during the night.

3.       Exercise is a HUGE stress reliever for me. I felt tense and anxious all week because I didn’t have my normal outlet.

4.       The body needs rest in between training sessions in order for the next one to be productive. When I headed back to the gym by Friday my training was strong and I felt good. I didn’t lose any strength or endurance gains in 4 days. In fact, I felt great the entire day.

This was a good experiment for me. I probably don’t need to take off that many days in a row going forward, but I now know that building in shorter, more frequent rest/recovery periods is critical. I’ve always known these things, but have had a hard time actually doing it. After all, we all have an addiction to exercise to some degree which can have its mental challenges like any other addiction.

The other big convincing factor for me was I used my time from training to prepare for the ACE PT Exam I’m taking on May 30^th. Changing my career towards my true passion is VERY important to me, so it was an easy trade-off. But I’m glad that training and I have made up and we are back together now.