25 | March | 2014 | Chocolate Covered Race Medals

CHECK BACK LATER TODAY FOR THE WINNER OF MY WHITE BUFFALO KITCHEN GIVEAWAY 🙂

Good Morning and Happy Tuesday everyone!

If you all follow me on Instagram or twitter {which you should, if you don’t. just saying}, then you know that I was all kinds of endorphin drunk last night.

I was searching the ol’ pinterest for some workout-variety inspiration and came across a fun looking new-to-me tabata style workout. For those of you who aren’t familiar with tabata, like myself, here is a brief description.

The Tabata workout lasts only four minutes, but is one of the longest four minutes you’ll encounter. The structure of the program is:

Workout hard for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Complete eight rounds

You push yourself as hard as you can for 20 seconds and rest for 10 seconds until you complete eight sets. You can do pretty much any exercise you wish. You can do squats, pushups, rows, etc… Any exercise that works your large muscle groups is strongly recommended. {from active.com}

So 20 seconds of high intensity work, followed by 10 seconds of rest. Then you move on to the next move, completing 8 rounds (4 minutes). It doesn’t seem too hard right, 20 seconds? Don’t judge it til you try it.

I had 3 sets of those 8 set routines. Here’s how it looked:

Lower Body

Squats
High knees
Lunges (Right lead)
High knees
Lunges (Left lead)
Skier jumps
Sumo squats
Skier jumps

Upper Body

Push ups
Plank with rotation twist
Side plank hip dips (right side)
Plant with rotation twist
Side plank hip dips (left side)
Mountain climbers
Superman
Mountain climbers

Abs And Core

Crunches
Planks
Bicycle crunches
Planks with knee tucks
Reverse abs
Planks with criss-cross
Leg lifts
Up-down planks

To do the complete workout: I started with a warm up on the treadmill (12:30 minutes), one round of the routine. 5 Minutes on the treadmill. Another round of the routine. So I repeated the same exact routine twice. Then a cool down with random upper body weights. I ended the routine a sweaty, endorphin drunk mess. The best 🙂

I cannot express enough how much I LOVED this routine! You can expect to be seeing much more of the like here on Chocolate medals 🙂

Dinner

Let’s just say I was a hungry hungry hippo once I finished this routine, so I was thrilled to see the hubby was working on dinner by the time I finished.

Since I wasn’t so much feeling pizza Sunday night (or cooking in general, really), we saved it for Monday night. Best decision ever.

We switched things up a bit, using

artichoke hearts
mushrooms
green onions
Moz CHUB instead of shredded cheese

And instead of precooking the crust, we just put it all in at once, in hopes that it would keep the crust soft without much “wetness” from cheese or sauce.

Pizza success! I mentioned last night that I think this was a top 5 contender for Jara homemade pizzas. YUM!

Success

And you all will be happy to know last night was a success as far as my goal to end the evening with a walk instead of stuffing myself silly with sweets! Does that mean I didn’t have dessert? Heck no

I still had a gluten free chocolate chip cookie and three of those mini chocolate covered pretzel sandwiches (I was kind and shared one with Zach). Once I finished, I promptly got up, bundled up (it was quite cold) and took Gusman on a 20 minute walk around our neighborhood. By the time I got home, I wanted more of those darn pretzels, but I stayed strong and in stead cuddled with the hubby and watched Colbert. I went to bed comfortable and satisfied, which is something I’d like to make a habit of 🙂

This Morning

Woof. Between yesterday’s lunch work out (the killer 10’s routine on my Chocolate Medal’s pinterest page) and that tabata work out at night, my legs were FEELING it this morning. I woke up NOT wanting to crawl out of bed, but knowing that we have dinner plans so if anything was going to happen it had to be now.

And so it did.

Workout of the day

4 easy miles including 2.5 minute walking warm up, then run at a comfortable pace until I hit four miles, then walked it out to 40 minutes. This run took pushing myself for every.single.one of those 40 minutes — but it’s those runs that make us stronger, right?

CHECK BACK LATER TODAY FOR THE WINNER OF MY WHITE BUFFALO KITCHEN GIVEAWAY 🙂