Getting Back to Exercise

I’ve had some inquiries from folks about what I do for a workout routine to accompany all the delicious vegan food I spend much of my time eating! This has been a very tough week, and honestly, I think the routine of exercising every morning has really helped. Some background on my relationship with exercise… I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with exercise. In highschool, I was very active. I was on the soccer, swimming, crew, and track teams and as a result I was constantly on an at least 5 days a week schedule of working out, either on the field, track or water, or in the gym training for these activities. Needless to say, in those days I was very fit. Then came college, and following a fairly typical story, I stopped exercising, got distracted by school and social life, and gained the freshman 20 or 30 lbs (who said anything about stopping at the freshman 15?!). My weight and exercise level wavered in college, and periodically I would go to the gym and get into an exercise routine and it would feel great, but I wouldn’t sustain the practice of going. I did manage to take fairly regular yoga classes in college, which was something new to me at the time. After college, I moved to Seattle and honestly, did almost no exercise for the first year or two of being here. Then, I got into doing yoga sporadically at a studio nearby our house. I liked yoga because it was increasing flexibility and it got my body moving without any extreme kind of exercise.

Coming to Bikram:

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled across Bikram Yoga, which is a 90 minute set of 26 poses. The class is the same every time and Bikram has trained all of the teachers to say almost exactly the same kinds of narrative with the class. The room is heated to about 105 F and the class is for all levels at once. I had always liked the other forms of yoga I had tried, but I LOVE Bikram. It is very intense, you sweat like crazy and for much of the class, your heart is pounding. Bikram’s not for everyone, particularly not if you have any heart problems or other serious medical problems, but I’ve really enjoyed doing it. I’ve taken classes on and off for the past year and a half. But then I started thinking more about weight lifting and building muscle in a way that Bikram doesn’t do so much. Don’t get me wrong, Bikram does certainly build strength and will change your body to a more toned version of itself. But I decided to start going to the gym again (with a great gym buddy I met at school).

Back to the Gym:

At the beginning of this past summer, I got a gym membership and started going with a friend of mine who is a real gym expert and could teach me about a workout routine and weight-lifting. He’s been going to the gym for years, he is in amazing shape, and I always feel like I’m with the cool kid at the gym! We got on a routine for the summer together and now that fall is here, I feel confident enough to go to the gym and lift weights on my own. I have not been to Bikram all summer, but I found a Groupon for it a while back, and plan to go sporadically through the winter. Here is an example of my weekly workout routine. My goal is to lose some weight, but more importantly to get strong! I’ve been meeting both of those goals this summer.

Note about weights: I do 3 or 4 sets of 12 reps each on at least 3 or 4 different weightlifting activities (machines or free weights) for each muscle group. I lift as much weight as I can and still get to 12 each time (I’m trying to tone up, but not build giant body builder muscles, so this routine works well). Also, the order of the weight lifting changes up so that my muscles don’t know what to expect on any given day.

Monday: cardio–30 min elliptical; weights–chest and triceps

Tuesday: cardio–60 min elliptical or 30 elliptical & 30 stairmaster; abs

Wednesday: weights–kick ass leg workout: usually 6 or 7 different exercises at least (this is intense and will make you too sore to walk, so this is done alone).

Thursday: cardio–60 min elliptical or 30 elliptical & 30 stairmaster; abs

Friday: cardio–30 min elliptical; weights–back and biceps

Saturday: light cardio–1 hour walk with Maizy

Sunday: light cardio–1 hour walk with Maizy

Also, at the beginning of the summer, I was trying to get into a healthier eating/exercise balance and so I used for about two months a free online fitness/calorie program: My Fitness Pal. It allows you to track any goals you have, what exercise you do, and the calories you eat. I mainly wanted to use it to get a sense of the rough balance of calories burned to calories consumed, and it also counts how much protein, iron, etc. you get with each meal. For your bodyweight/gender/age, it tells you how much of each thing you should shoot for each day and let’s you know how you’re doing along the way. This was helpful just as a rough gauge to make sure I was getting the nutrients that I needed from the food I was eating. I hate counting calories because I think it tends toward the obsessive, but it was a good way to get started and I’m glad to have done it for a short while.

Finally, my sister recommended a book, The Women’s Health Big Book of Exercises which is filled with great strength-training exercises. It has many great ideas and offers variations for each exercises which decrease or increase the difficulty depending on your needs. I would highly recommend it!