Today is Friday, so the day I do a re-cap of how my week has been doing the Michelle Bridges 12WBT run by Huggies. We started Week 1 on Monday and so far, it has been great. The eating plans are full of fresh, wonderful tasting food. I have not been hungry throughout the day and not looked to top up with anything tempting.
Exercise has been easy as well. I have diarised what I am doing each day and its funny how your mindset changes, but if the diary says 6.30pm Pump class, it gets done with minimal fuss. I am doing a combo of classes and DVD workouts. TBone leaves at 5am for work 6 days a week, so I can't eave the house in the morning to exercise - and I am not going to exercise before 5am regardless of how much Michelle threatens to kick my butt. So weekends and 2 week nights I can get a class in, but the other days are DVDs in nap time, which seems to be working well. It gives me enough variety to keep my goldfish attention span going.
I love the Les Mills classes, particulalry Body Pump, Body Step and RPM. I find the repetition suits me, nothing tricky and I can just switch my brain off and exercise. Then last night I tried a Zumba class ..........
My mum must have learnt early on that I probably wasn't going to make a career as a dancer. When I was given the 'lead' teddy bear role in The Teddy Bear's Picnic ballet recital she probably guessed. 'Lead' sounds good yeah? No. I was just the teddy bear that stayed in the centre of the stage the whole time in first position and all the other girls pirouetted around me. She also probably realised that I wasn't co-ordinated enough for gymnastics from all the bruises I came home with. And by the time I was doing Jazz Ballet, she was confident enough that I could miss the grand finale recital so we could go to Perth to have my braces tightened. I was sure I would have rocked to Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, but she obviously recognised the truth.
I love to dance, but it is usually confined to the house or with the aid of cocktails. Having a love of something, doesn't mean you are good at it and last night proved it.
I love to dance, but it is usually confined to the house or with the aid of cocktails. Having a love of something, doesn't mean you are good at it and last night proved it.
I have always wanted to give Zumba a go. I was blinded by the hype. I had seen the ads and thought it would be easy. I expected a Latino instructor, but was met with the tiniest whitest girl - don't get me wrong, she was good at what she did, but I think I would have done better if she spoke Spanish.......
I was atrocious. I didn't really even get a sweat up because I spent most of the time just trying to stay upright 20 steps behind the class. There are lots of salsa and cha cha moves, a lot of hip gyrating and pelvic thrusts. I couldn't, for the life of me, get my pelvis to move separately to my arms, so ended up looking like a helpless octopus. I wasn't even helped by the song words "Put your left hand in the air", "Put your right hand in the air".
The other women (only women) in the class seemed to have some idea what was going on and had genuine looks of enjoyment on their faces - just like the ads promised me. They didn't all match what the instructor was doing, but kept dancing through the whole thing and I think that is the key. I came home feeling that I needed to do more exercise to make up for the lack of sweating I did, so today I will have to do a morning and evening DVD session.
Will I try Zumba again? The Old Me would say No.
Next week, Michelle wants us to focus on breaking old habits. Maybe one of my habits that needs to change is that I don't persist with anything that I am not immediately good at. Maybe to make new habits, and a new mind set, I need to give it another go, get over my self-consciousness and realise that although I think the world revolves around me, no-one else in that Zumba class cares about what the fat chick (soon to be healthy) in the back row is doing with her hands.
I may just have to put myself out there and give it another go. I will let you know.
How do you exercise? Do you get self conscious of how you look?
Chantel x
