Hi guys!

Hope you all enjoyed my friend Shannon’s St. Patrick’s Day guest post this morning.  Tomorrow I will be helping my Irish boyfriend and friends from home embrace their culture over in Somerville.  I mean, I have to be a supportive friend, right?  I can’t wait to wear the shamrock headband that Shannon made for me!

Week Wrap Up

You know, just some things I’ve learned / pondered / thought about this week.

• Why don’t more people enter my giveaways for free things?  Especially free food?  Especially free chocolates?  C’mon people.  Even though I like to pretend I am, I’m not a big blogger.  Your chances of winning are actually really high.  So if you haven’t entered to win these free goodies yet, please click to this link and do so!
• Sometimes one side of my body is more sore than the other.  What the heck did I do this week to work my right side more?  Should I go bust out some left legged squats to even myself out?
• I bought whole wheat pastry flour just for the sake of it because I thought it sounded fun.  This is very unlikely me because I’ve been really trying hard to plan out what I’m going to use all my groceries for.  Anyone have a fun thing I can bake with whole wheat pastry flour?
• Should I be concerned that I’m starting to really look forward to low-key Friday nights in over a social Friday night out?
• Speaking of nights out, I don’t really get bar crawls.  If you are on a planned bar crawl, usually you have several destinations to hit throughout the crawl.  What if you are having a grand old time at bar #3?  Do you HAVE to move on to bar #4 just for the sake of the crawl?  Or what if you aren’t on a planned bar crawl, and you are just out for the night?  If you end up hitting 5 bars just by the nature of how your night went, did you do a bar crawl?
• CBC folks — the routine to “Hotel” – what the HECK do you call the arm move where you squeeze them down toward each other?  Last week Liz said she squashing something, the week before I called them awk alligator arms.  Anything more universal?
• Look what I found!  Thirteen Ways to Amp Up Your Pushup
• It’s really funny to hear people who have never heard of quinoa try to pronounce quinoa.
• “Strong is the New Skinny” is SUCH an awesome mantra.  Thanks, Jess, for passing this along:

And lastly, this workout is awesome!

From Thursday morning’s class:

Upper Body Strength Tabata + Cardio Intervals + Lower Body + Ab Workout

We started with our usual warmup, then moved into some upper body and cardio work.  I adapted some of the workout from Jen’s “It’s Tabata Time” post from the other day.  Thanks, Jen!

If you don’t know what Tabata means, it’s when you do 20 seconds on and 10 seconds off, repeated 8 times through for a total of 4 minutes.

Note:  I planned 5 different upper body Tabatas, but everyone started giving me mean looks by the time we finished up back, so we skipped chest.  Plus, I wanted to make sure we got to the other parts of the workout.  If you were to do just this part on your own, it would take about 30 minutes (warmup not included) and you’d target all major upper body muscle groups.

We then moved into lower body, which I adapted from Christina’s Perfect Lines Class at CBC on Monday.  Her class always kicks my butt, literally.  This isn’t the whole workout from Monday, but is the whole workout I had class do yesterday.

We did this once through on each leg, and used the wall for balance on the plie squats.  This workout would take about 15-20 minutes if you were to do this as an isolated section on your own.

Finally, finished with a 10 minute ab routine!

Pretty self-explanatory 🙂

And a cooldown/stretch sesh, of course.

What’s something random you learned, pondered, or thought about this week?  Anyone do an awesome workout they’d like to share?  What’s up for the weekend?