Thursday, April 17, 2008

Welcome Back Sore Muscles!

I woke up this morning with that lovely soreness you get after a workout. Not so bad that I can't lift my arms above my head, but enough to know that I gave my muscles some challenge.

I finally got off my butt yesterday and headed to the gym. I know that I'm definitely needing to work on my cardio, but I'm also concerned about getting my body strong for the physical stresses that an extra 25 pounds are going to cause (though I'm only up 2 pounds so far). When I was working out with my trainer Cindy in Columbia, I had a great strength training regimen going on, but since starting to travel it's been nearly impossible to keep that up. Now that I'm settled in one place and have a gym membership, there's no excuse for that. I did some free weights and focused on the arms and legs then hit the mat for some abdominal work (oh my poor stomach muscles, you have no idea how ruined you're going to get!). I took it easy and just did two sets of my old routines because I knew that if I wasn't able to move my arms or walk today, it wouldn't be productive.

My plan is to strength train twice a week and start adding some abdominal work in more frequently since I really need to get that area as strong as possible. I do have a Pregnancy Fitness book kindly lent to me by Merk that I'm consulting just to see if there is anything I should avoid (exercises where I'm flat on my back) and how to modify as I get farther along.

I'm going to add cardio as I can, but probably focus more on walking, using the elliptical and stair climber. If I haven't really been running the past few months, it doesn't seem like it's the brightest thing to start pushing when I'm 15 weeks pregnant. I will be using my heart rate monitor and keeping things in a nice upper range of zone 2. We'll see if my personal motivation keeps up!

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