2WWB - Day 7

Today's grade: A+

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

So today I tried out 'power hour' at the gym. The description was a bit vague, "High Energy, Fat-burning, muscle toning, core strengthening. The ultimate workout. Power Hour has it all in one class." Reading this I assumed that the class would be a fairly standard HIIT class. Boy was I wrong.

My first hint of the pure craziness was the instructor's advice to go low on the dumbells because 'we would be using them for more than half an hour'. ??? . So, not having an ego problem, I grabbed the 1kg. Of course all the guys ignored the instructors advice to go for 3kg max and went straight for the big ones. 

What followed was basically 40 minutes of non-stop upper body strength work (unending reps cycling through most arm and shoulder muscles); with lower body cardio intervals added in (jogging whilst continuing dumbbell exercises). Mostly the instructor shouted 'up, up, up' in voice that morphed from a cute foreign accent to militant, grating screech (ok so it was still cute, foreign accent, but I was starting to hate it). 

People started sizing down pretty quickly or just throwing their weights on the floor and going without. There were a lot of pain faces; especially from the guys that picked up the big weights. Heh heh.

So I did ok... I managed to do 90% of the upper body work (thanks to the low weights), and 100% of the cardio. Unfortunately my HRM didn't connect with my loop properly before the call so I can't see what my heart rate looked like, and how much calories I burned.

I actually liked it a little because it was completely different, and an upper body workout on the Tuesday fits in really well with my general schedule (see below)

• Monday - Body conditioning (whole body)
• Tuesday - Power hour (upper body)
• Wednesday - LBT (lower body)
• Thursday - Yoga (upper body)
• Friday - Cardio (lower body)
• Sat - Yoga (upper body)
• Sunday - biking/running (lower body)

See - pretty neat! Of course I usually end up skipping the odd one or two sessions throughout the week (good because it means I can recover).