My Christmas workout and the day after...

Yesterday was a simple and mostly uneventful day.  The kids were up at 7:30 and ready to open presents.  Chris was able to take a short break from working, just long enough to come home and watch them.  That took about 30 or 40 minutes, and the rest of the day they spent trying out all of their new things.  Chris went back to work, and I put a turkey in the oven then got busy on a workout.

Tuesday is my shoulders/abs day and also an interval run.  I used resistance bands and my 5 pound hand weights to do most of my shoulder exercises.  It's not quite the same as being at the gym and using the equipment and the heavier weights, but I was able to make do.  For abs I used my stability ball and did crunches, planks, pikes and then also did a few floor exercises, like reverse crunches with leg lifts/extensions.

Once I finished with weights, I moved on to the treadmill.  I did about 4 miles in around 45 minutes, alternating 1 minute sprints with slower jogging and walking.  And that's it, my Christmas day workout - unless you include all of the Just Dance 4 I played with my kids the rest of the day. :)

Today I made my way back to the gym.  I have to say that after consistently going to the gym 6 days a week for the past 6 weeks, I didn't like not being able to go yesterday and I'm going to be facing a similar situation next week when the gym is closed on New Year's Day.  Blah.  Anyway, after a brief running warm up on a treadmill, I went to the weight room and got started on today's workout - back and biceps.  I began by doing pull-ups, for which I had to use the assist machine because I didn't have anyone to spot me.  Bummer. After doing my 4 super-sets (8 different exercises paired up into sets of two), I moved on to do my cardio for the day.  Much like last week, I opted to use a stair machine.  While I was on there, one of my (other) favorite instructors at the gym, Brandi, came and got on a machine next to me.  After an hour on the stair stepper, I was finished with my workout while Brandi was headed back down to the weight room to do her strength training.  As it had come up in our conversation that I had to use the assist machine to do my pull-ups because there wasn't anyone available to spot me, she offered to help me do some "bonus" sets of (real) pull-ups.  So before going home, I went back in the weight room with Brandi and did 3 sets of 8-10 regular pull-ups, using her as my "assist" this time.  As hard as those are, I love doing them because every week I can feel my improvement.  I'm really hoping that it's not too much longer before I can at least do 1 completely on my own.