Exercise

Bro, do you even lift?

13408728544_d44d13d94c_oI’ve become a little obsessed with weight lifting. Unlike a lot of other exercise, it has very linear and easy to track data. Whereas running involves complicated variables like pacing and terrain, weight lifting is pretty consistent from week to week so it seems easier to hit a new record in at least one metric.

I go to a PlanetFitness,  a cheap gym that caters to noobs and people who want to do endless cardio. They don’t have much in terms of barbell weights, but they have a full rack of dumbbells and a couple cable towers so I can get most of what I want to done with no problems. The only thing I really dislike is having to do deadlifts and squats on a Smith Machine. The Smith Machine seems universally reviled by people who lift because it limits the motion you do, making for an inefficient workout that doesn’t translate well to free weights. If at the end of the year I’ve totally crushed all my lifting goals, I might consider upgrading to a gym with a real weight area.

The more I learn about exercise and getting into shape, the more frustrated I get with stupid “fitspo” images on Pinterest. In a fit of rage I created fucknofitness.tumblr.com to snark on all the stupid diets and workout routines that promise to help you ditch 5 lbs and “tone up your arms by Tuesday.” A thigh gap is not on my list of goals, thank you.

I’m making good progress with getting into shape for my aerial silks performance. I can now get through the act straight through, and have the choreography pretty much set. Now I have to focus on not looking like I am dying up there. My cousin said to me, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you make that look HARD.”

AirplaneDive

I’ll take it as a compliment, because it IS hard.

I’m down 12 pounds from my starting weight at the end of January. I originally set my weight loss goal at 125 lbs, but I’m down to 130 and am pretty happy with how I look so now I’m just focusing on getting stronger. I took another silhouette photo two weeks ago, and there’s definitely a noticeable change in my shape.

SilhouetteFront-Animated

Obviously the photos don’t line up perfectly, my head hasn’t magically gotten narrower (although I did get a haircut). I did my best to shrink/squash the two photos so they’re as similar as possible, lining up my hands and shoulders (which aren’t going to move around or change much). A lot of the neck thinning is due to the angle I was looking in the first photo, but the weight loss in my midsection is real.

I’ve settled into a regular routine for working out and stick to it most days.

Mondays: Silks performance prep
Tuesdays: 2 miles of running + weight lifting
Wednesdays: 2 miles of running + weight lifting
Thursdays: Stationary cycling with my mom, silks practice
Friday: Handbalancing
Saturday: 5k run + weight lifting

Sunday is a day of rest, like God intended!

Every other week or so I’ve been meeting with a trainer to make sure I’m not overworking any one area. The trainer works with a lot of clients who do circus aerials, so he’s able to tailor my workouts to fit my aerials schedule. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of staying well rounded until he showed me some leg and tricep exercises. I couldn’t walk normally or lift my arms for a solid day and a half.

I’m up to three consecutive pull-ups and making steady progress with the rest of my lifting.

This January the whole family is going to Disney World for the Run Disney runs (5k through marathon). I plan on doing the 10k and most everyone else is doing the half marathon. Once the aerials showcase is over I’ll start doing a lot more running.

My running playlist is pretty played out. Any suggestions for favorite running music would be greatly appreciated!

Family

On Family

Every Sunday we go to my husband’s grandmother’s house for dinner. On an average week 15 people show up, but if everyone happens to be there we cram 30 people into her living and dining rooms. On those weeks we hope for good weather so the kids can go outside instead of playing tackle football at our feet. There is always cake, because it is always someone’s birthday. Through marriage I’ve gained entry into an extremely close knit family, practically an amoeba that absorbs new members like they’ve always been there. My own grandparents have been gone for quite some time, and it’s nice, albeit a little strange, to once again receive cards signed “grandmom and grandpop.”

By contrast, my family appears a bit aloof. We don’t get together often, and when we do there are generally a lot of introductions that go something like “Hi, I’m soandso, I think I’m your cousin.” Some of it is due to the huge age spread within each generation. My grandmother had 7 children over about 30 years. I’ve got cousins in high school and cousins with grandchildren. The sheer size of the family makes it hard to keep up with everyone, and we don’t all live in a concentrated area like my husband’s family does. Our families are very different creatures, and when my husband and I first got together I started to feel very sad that my own extended family didn’t look like his. After a wake this past weekend where I saw uncles and first cousins I hadn’t seen in 20 years I spent a lot of time thinking about why we’re so distant.

My family is like the elephant in the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s so big that no one person can really get the full picture of what’s going on. We can only see a small part at a time, and make conclusions based on that. For a long time, I believed my uncle destroyed my family.

When I was younger, in grade school, I remember getting together at my uncle’s house for holidays. There was croquet and billiards and a big dinner around a huge dining room table. In the mid-nineties my aunt died, and I don’t remember many regular family parties after that. My uncle fell apart after his wife died, and from my perspective as a 12 year old, the family fell apart with it. Family gatherings, when they happened, were tense. If my uncle wasn’t there, his absence was noted and mourned. If he was there, his drinking made him unpredictable and sometimes scary. I watched my dad repeatedly struggle to bring my uncle back to reality, only to have it fail catastrophically every time. Eventually my uncle became “my estranged uncle,” and remained so for another twenty years. I saw the family less and less as I started my career and family.

My uncle passed away recently, and our loosely assembled family coalesced for his wake. At first it was pretty awkward, and I tried to figure out how to introduce my husband to a cousin when I was only 50% sure of their name. I was embarrassed that I could name my husband’s family members more readily than my own. But once people got past the obligatory “I haven’t seen you since you were this big,” I could start to see that we were still a family, even if we weren’t so closely knit as others. Not everyone had a bond with everyone else, but there were threads of connection running all around the room that held us together. There was something there, even if it wasn’t as picturesque as Sunday dinners at grandmom’s. There was laughter, and shared memories, and the occasional surprising discovery of things we didn’t know we had in common.

I now understand that it takes more than one broken man to destroy a family. Even weird families like mine are made of tougher stuff than that. We may never fully clean up the damage left in my uncle’s wake, but we’re not dead yet either. Although we’ll probably never all be in one place again, or function as a singular amoeba-like entity, we can strengthen the individual links between people. We can move forward, and try to heal as we go. We can become friends on Facebook and ‘like’ each other’s photos, celebrate our successes and offer sympathy for our failures. We may always be a little awkward, and that’s OK. At my uncle’s wake I finally learned to stop resenting my family for what it wasn’t, and love it for what it is.

Exercise

App / Gadget Round Up

After writing my post on how I use Evernote I realized I actually use a ton of tech to stay motivated and track my exercise progress. What I use slowly changes over time, but here’s what I’m using now:

Hardware

Fitbit Aria – Body fat scale

fitbit-aria-main

The Aria is a wifi-enabled scale which automatically logs your weight and body fat. Body fat is calculated via bioelectrical impedence, and while it’s not considered particularly accurate it is useful for tracking general changes over time. Mostly it has made me aware of when I’m just losing water weight rather than fat. It’s also shown me that when I under-eat I tend to lose lean muscle rather than fat, which is a helpful lesson as I try to steer clear from disordered eating.

FitBit One – General activity tracking

My Fitbit account syncs with MyFitnessPal, so if I’m active during the day MFP will adjust my calorie target accordingly. I haven’t been quite so competitive about my step count lately, as I’m pretty focused on strength training at the moment. But it’s still very satisfying to rack up 14,000 steps on a trip to the zoo.

Samsung Galaxy S4 – smartphone

While not specifically a workout gadget, I rely on my smartphone heavily for tracking most of my workouts.

Pebble – Smartwatch

pebble_watch

Also not specifically a workout gadget, but a number of the fitness apps I use have Pebble watchfaces for quick access to info while I work out.

Apps

Runkeeper – Run / cycling tracking, Free

Runkeeper uses my phone’s GPS to track how fast and how far I’ve run. You can also use it to plan running routes if you’re targeting a specific distance. It has a Pebble watch face so I can see my time and distance at a glance without having to wait for the audio cue. I switched to Runkeeper from Nike+ because the Nike app kept crashing on my phone. Runkeeper also has an API you can use to access the data.

MyFitnessPal – Food tracking, Free

I log everything I eat in MyFitnessPal (MFP) though sometimes I’ll skip it when I’m out with friends. I mostly cook my own food so I use the recipe builder to get a rough idea of the nutritional info. It was through MFP that I realized I was eating way too much added sugar in my diet (which remains a struggle for me).

GymPact – Gym attendance rewards, “Free,” sort of, but requires credit card

This is an app where you can earn rewards for going to the gym, and likewise pay a fee for skipping it. I set my target at 4 workouts per week, and lose $5 for every day missed if I don’t manage to hit my goal. There are three ways to get a workout to count: check in on my phone, do a GPS-enabled run with RunKeeper, or hit 10,000 Fitbit steps for the day. So far I’ve earned about $25 total (and lost $10 due to slacking). If you see me at the gym on a Sunday, it’s almost definitely because I’m behind on GymPact and don’t want to sacrifice the $5 to sleep in.

FitNotes – Weight training log, Free

This is a simple Android app I use to keep track of how much weight I’m lifting. It’s pretty basic but does let me export my data so I can make a pretty graph later.

Impetus – Interval timer, Free

I like this interval timer because it has good Pebble integration and allows for some pretty complicated interval sets.

The Drawer of Dead Gear

Here’s what I haven’t been using so much lately:

Adidas MiCoach – the hardware became unreliable and it was out of warranty, so that was the end of this guy. A big disappointment considering how expensive it was.
Nike+ iPod – Superceded by a smartphone + Runkeeper
Zombies, Run! – Android app. No real reason I stopped listening to this one, just got bored of it. I might start again now that the weather is nice and I’m running more.
Just Six Weeks – Android app. This is an app for tracking the various 100 Pushups / 20 Pull Ups / etc challenges. My goals have shifted and I don’t use this app anymore, but I still recommend it to folks.
Couch to 5k – Android app. Happy to say I can now run a 5k at a 12 minute pace, and no longer need this one!
Nike Training Club – Android app. This app provides a number of bodyweight and dumbbell workouts and is a great place to start when you’re finding a regular routine. Another one I no longer need but still recommend.
All the Wii / Kinect exergame titles – Turns out I really like to get out of the house to work out.

What apps and gadgets are you using?

Cooking

How I Use Evernote for Meal Planning

Seven weeks after my headfirst dive into cooking and I’m still at it. I use Evernote extensively to keep it all organized, and it has been a lifesaver. Here’s how I stay organized through each step of the cooking process.

Storing and organizing my recipes

Every recipe I cook is stored in Evernote. I occasionally tag them with things like “quick” or write notes at the top, but for the most part it’s just nice to have everything all in one place. I can also add pictures if the recipe doesn’t provide one, which makes for a nice way to browse through recipes.

Some of my recipes in Evernote Touch
Some of my recipes in Evernote Touch

On the weekend I sit down and plan three meals for the week. In addition to planning nutritionally balanced meals, I’m often trying to use up some leftover ingredients from the week before. Being able to search my recipes quickly is great, I just search for “spinach” and everything using spinach pop up.

With the Evernote Web Clipper extension for Chrome I can save any recipe directly to Evernote. It saves both the text of the recipe and the URL, so I can always refer back to the original if I need to, but if it disappears or changes down the line I’ve still got my copy.

An enchilada recipe from a cookbook
An enchilada recipe from a cookbook

Cookbook recipes can be stored as an image, just snap a photo of the recipe and upload it to Evernote. The image is then processed and you can search by the words that appear in the image. I generally just get the recipe title and ingredients list, and then note the page number if it’s not visible in the photo. Then I can find the recipe easily when it’s time to cook.

Making a grocery list and shopping

Once I’ve decided what to cook for the week I sit down with the recipes and make a grocery list. Occasionally when I get to the store I hit a snag, like realizing there are multiple types of a certain ingredient. Evernote syncs my recipes to my phone, so I can pull up the recipe and figure out what I need. If I’m really in a bind and it’s an internet recipe I can pull up the original page’s comments and see if there are any suggestions for substitutions.

You can also save your grocery list in Evernote, but since my husband often does the grocery shopping and doesn’t have a smart phone I still do mine on paper. I also find it really satisfying to cross things off by hand.

Cooking Day

Google Calendar is my favorite way of keeping track of what I plan to cook when. If something unexpected comes up I can just drag and drop that day’s meal to tomorrow. It also provides a good reality check: if I have a day full of meetings I’m probably not going to have time to cook that Barefoot Contessa recipe.

I have a hybrid laptop/tablet so when it’s time to cook I put it into “tablet mode” to display the recipe and get to work. I can add notes or make changes to the recipe as needed and they’re automatically saved for next time. When recipes don’t pass muster (I’m looking at you, cheddar cheese stuffed chicken breasts) I just delete them. Goodbye, bad recipe!

 

Cooking, Recipes

Egg White Breakfast Muffins

In an effort to cut down on sugar I’ve replaced my yogurt and granola breakfast with egg “muffins.” They’re really more like a crustless quiche but they’re made in a muffin tin, and make a really good brain-dead breakfast with plenty of protein. You can make them with whatever ingredients you’ve got handy, and I’ve tried a bunch of different combos, including whole eggs, but the recipe below is my favorite so far.

Egg White Breakfast Muffins

Makes 8 egg “muffins”

IMG_1627

Ingredients

  • 8 egg whites1
  • A handful of baby spinach, chopped
  • 2 mushrooms, diced
  • 1/2 cup reduced fat shredded cheddar cheese2
  • 1/4 tsp salt or to taste
  • 1/4 tsp pepper or to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisking with a fork, combine egg whites, spinach, and mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper. Divide egg mixture evenly into eight spaces of a muffin tin (if not using a nonstick tin, spray with oil or cooking spray first). Top each cup with cheddar cheese. Bake for 20 minutes or until just beginning to brown at the edges.

IMG_1619

I find they come out best if I only fill the cups about half way. Beyond that they get very tall and puffy in the oven, and then collapse like a bounce house at the end of a carnival.

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The muffins keep well in the fridge. In the morning just pop one in the microwave for a minute and you’re good to go. You can also freeze them, just make sure you allow them to cool before freezing to minimize the formation of ice crystals.

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If you’re using whole eggs you may get more like 10 or 12 muffins out of the recipe, but here’s the nutrition breakdown using the above ingredients:

42 calories
1g carbohydrates
2g fat
6g protein
<1g sugar and fiber3

As a delightful surprise, these are toddler approved! I’m not sure how much longer we’ll go before she notices the spinach and starts to pick it out, but for now it’s a great way to sneak some veggies into my almost-two year old.

  1. If you don’t have another use for the yolks I really suggest eating them instead of wasting them, they’re good for you. []
  2. Full fat cheese works too, of course []
  3. you get a little from the veggies but not much []
Cooking, Recipes

Super Delicious Crock Pot Indian Curry

While I’m no longer cooking 4 new recipes a week, I’m still cooking a whole bunch. This Indian-style curry recipe is one of my favorites so far. Chopping all the ingredients is a little time consuming, but it’s a great slow cooker meal and very worth it. It also happens to be vegan! You can find the original recipe here. I’ve listed the quantities of stuff I use here, which vary slightly from the original.

Ingredients:

  • Dash of olive oil
  • 2 medium yellow onions
  • 2 large carrots
  • 1 tablespoon curry powder
  • 1 teaspoon brown sugar
  • knuckle-sized chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
  • 2 teaspoons minced garlic1
  • 1 serrano chile, seeded and minced
  • 2 cans of chickpeas, drained
  • 1 potato, cubed
  • 1 bell pepper, diced
  • a big handful of green beans, cut into 1 inch lengths
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
  • 1 can diced tomatoes ( 14.5 oz can)
  • 1 can vegetable broth (14 oz)
  • 3 big handfuls of baby spinach
  • 1 can coconut milk

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First, heat some olive oil in a pan. Cook the carrots and onions in the oil until the onions begin to transluce (5ish minutes)

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Then add the sugar, garlic, curry powder, and serrano pepper. Mix everything well and cook until everything has a nice brown to it (another minute or two). Remove from heat.

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Put the green beans, potato, chickpeas, diced tomatoes, vegetable broth, salt, pepper (both kinds) and bell pepper into your crock pot. Add the carrot-and onion mixture and stir everything up really well.

2014-02-22 10.36.14

Cook everything on high for 5 hours. When you’re ready to serve, add the spinach and coconut milk and mix well. You can serve this with rice, but since the potatoes have plenty of starchy carbs I usually skip the rice entirely.

  1. I use the stuff in a jar because I am lazy []
Exercise

One Month Down

After a month of exercising and eating less junk, I’ve lost 6.2 pounds and 2.3 percentage points of body fat.

Month1weight
Weight (in kg) on the left, calories leftover on the right

It’s hard to quantify strength, but I am definitely getting stronger. I can now do a few trapeze tricks I had trouble with (in particular, pulling back up to sitting after a crucifix) and I’m slowly inching up in weight used for my various strength training exercise. I still have a long way to go, in particular with core strength, but I can feel improvement. I’m running considerably faster than I used to, and managed to go 2.4 miles in 30 minutes without feeling too terrible. My best ever 5k time was 35:58 and I felt like I was going to die afterwards.

I look pretty much the same. I took some photos and compared them to the ones I took at the beginning of the month, and there’s really no discernible difference. I guess I’ll have to work a little harder for the six pack abs of my dreams.

It’s interesting because I felt like I made no progress the first two weeks, and that it all happened the last two. But looking at the chart there’s a fairly steady downward progression with a few bumps. I do think that logging what I eat has made a huge difference in my snacking. Planning my dinners ahead of time makes it much easier for me to eat the foods I like without totally blowing my calories or sugar for the day.

With all the snow (and more on the way) it’s been tough to hit my goal of 6 workouts per week but I usually get in 4 or 5. Over the next month I want to focus on both core strength and longer runs. I’ll keep working on lowering my body fat % (now at 31.7) but now that the worst of the emotional eating weight is gone I’m not worrying about the scale so much.

Cooking

Understanding Sugar

I’ve started tracking the foods I eat, and this time around I’m paying a lot more attention to the balance of macronutrients in my diet. I noticed I was consistently way over my suggested limit of 24 grams (a number auto-selected by MyFitnessPal). I tried to modify my eating to keep it under target.

©Emilie Hardman
©Emilie Hardman

But once I started paying attention to sugar, it was everywhere. Not just in the sneaky sugary foods (store bought pasta sauce, bread), but also my favorite whole foods. A banana, hard boiled egg, and a bowl of vegetable soup were enough to put me over my sugar limit for the day and I hadn’t even had dinner yet. The one day I did manage to keep under 24 grams more than half my calories came from fat (MFP wants it more like 30%). Adding even a small amount of honey to tea blew the whole day in one go. So I asked a nutritionist friend of mine: what’s the deal with sugar? She told me that the 24 gram goal refers to added sugar, and not to worry too much about the sugar in fruits and vegetables.

So then I did a whole bunch of reading, and here’s what I came up with.1

The American Heart Association suggests that women have no more than 25g of added sugar in their daily diet. Added sugar refers specifically to “sugars and syrups that are added to foods during processing or preparation.” The linked report is quick to note that added sugar is not inherently evil. In fact, when used sparingly, added sugar can be a great way to get people to enjoy nutrient-rich foods that may not be very palatable.

As far as total sugar intake (including intrinsic2 sugar), the EU suggests limiting it to 90g out of a 2000 calorie diet. Since I’m on a 1200 calorie diet, that translates to 54g, no more than half of which should be from added sugar. Nutrition labels do not distinguish between intrinsic sugars and added sugar. For a number of political and logistical reasons, this is unlikely to change any time soon. Fructose and glucose are found both intrinsically and as added sugar, and are chemically the same whether they’re coming to you from a strawberry or slice of white bread.  But wait, if it’s all the same stuff why does it matter where it’s coming from?

To understand this I had to read a bunch about glycemic load and glycemic index. My understanding of it is limited, but foods with a higher glycemic index (often those with added sugar) cause a blood sugar spike (and crash) whereas those with a low GI release sugar into the bloodstream on a more gradual basis. Blood sugar spikes are generally not good for you. They cause stress on your body and are linked to a variety of ailments including type 2 diabetes. An apple has about 23g of sugar, whereas a candy bar has just a few more (27 for snickers) but the much higher GI of the candy bar means the candy has significantly higher glycemic load. Your body has a harder time dealing with the candy bar than the apple, not to mention the fiber and other nutrients present in the apple that the candy bar lacks.

The upshot of this is not that all sugar is evil. Sugar is something your body needs. But it’s important to keep an eye on how much sugar you’re getting and where it’s coming from. A banana in the morning before I run is fine. Three isn’t. Hitting up the candy jar at grandmom’s probably isn’t worth it. When I started paying attention to sugar intake I lost a few pounds immediately. Not stuffing my face with peanut butter cups, even if I have enough calories left in the day, has been the difference between frustration and feeling like I’m making real progress.

  1. I am not in any way formally trained in this stuff, this is collected from a variety of sources, and probably has some major errors. I’m trying to make sense of what is an overwhelming amount of information on the topic, gentle correction is appreciated. []
  2. I am specifically referring to the sugar found in fruits and veggies as intrinsic because I do not want to give the false impression that added sugar is unnatural or artificial. Added sugar comes from a variety of sources, many of which are totally natural. []
Cooking

Dinner Week 3

Between illness and snow days it was not an inspiring week for cooking. We ate a bunch of leftovers, and actually managed to refrain from eating out, but I confess it wasn’t my best week in terms of healthy meals. Once again I have failed at photographing things. Honestly, they weren’t too photogenic.

Easy Skillet Tacos

Cooked Monday. Recipe from Southern Living.

F0MSTF03

Despite the word “easy” in the title, this recipe was written in a way that made it about 4 times more complicated than it had to be. I see absolutely no reason to remove the beef from the skillet, wipe it out, cook some onions in it, and then add the beef back in. Just sautee the onions in a small pan first and then add them to the beef. The layer of cheese on top was excessive (even after draining it’s still a greasy pile of ground beef) and I would have vastly preferred to just add a pinch of shredded cheese to each taco.

I probably won’t bother making this one again. There are better ways to make beef tacos.

Slow Cooker Turkey Chili

Cooked Wednesday. Recipe from Allrecipes.com.

turkeychili

Turkey chili remains a go-to recipe. It’s easy, it’s filling, and it’s not particularly terrible for you (especially if you resist the urge to cover it in cheese). This particular recipe was new to me and I liked it a bunch. I’m not sure I get any  health points for using condensed tomato soup, but other than that it’s pretty inoffensive.

Garlic-Lemon Double Stuffed Chicken

Cooked Thursday. Recipe from allrecipes.com.

stuffedchicken

A friend of mine affectionately dubbed this “heart attack chicken.” Breaded and stuffed with cheese, it’s definitely not low in fat or carbs. My main complaint though is that it wasn’t particularly delicious. It wasn’t bad, but the cheese filling felt too heavy and a little flavorless. Next time I eat a chicken breast stuffed with cheese, I’ll stick to the stuffed goat cheese recipe in my Ina Garten book.

I forgot to cook a vegetable to go with this, which helped emphasize just how not healthy it was.

Sad Vegetable Soup Part 2

On Saturday I made another round of sad vegetable soup, this time using up a bunch of lettuce and very rubbery broccoli. I made one egregious error: I added the garlic at the beginning of sauteeing the onions. This, I later learned, produces a rather bitter flavor as the garlic burns. As a result the soup has a particularly bitter aftertaste that the first batch didn’t have. Lesson learned, wait until later to add the garlic.

Exercise

Workout Update

Between being sick and getting snowed in it has been REALLY hard to keep anything like a regular workout schedule. I’ve managed to sneak in at least 4 per week, but I feel like my whole mojo is off. I find I don’t work out as hard at home because I get distracted by all the stuff around the house, and I feel anxious to get back to work.

I’m on the hunt for an ab / core routine. Right now I’m doing three repetitions of the following circuit, performing each exercise for 20 seconds and then resting for 10 seconds before going on to the next one:

  • crunches
  • side crunches (one set left one set right)
  • plank
  • side plank (one set each side)

That takes 9 minutes, and then I do three sets of 10 “toe touches” where I hang from the pull up bar and try to touch my toes to the bar while keeping my legs straight. At this point I’m not getting my feet anywhere near the bar, and have to stop to rest in the middle of the third set.

Overall the routine is kinda weak. I could probably stand to add some russian twists and v-ups into the circuit, but the most frustrating thing about it is I’m not really quantifying the work I’m doing. My back routine uses weights, and I can track the number of reps and weight I use to see progress over time. With my core routine it’s just sort of “oh, well I did that. good for me.”

Here’s hoping next week brings better weather and a return to my normal routine.