Unexpected challenge

When I went into the gym today, little did I expect to take part in a Challenge that was going on. I knew about it, but decided to give it a miss because of the set of exercises that they had advertised. I am not good with full push ups. Knee push up – OK. And my arm strength isn’t good enough for pull ups. I am working on it. There was a total of 6 exercises and we were supposed to do them in serial fashion and see how long we took for all 6 of them. Now, why would I go and sign up for this when I have joined gym after a long break and still working on my arm strength?

My gym instructor thought otherwise. When I went in today, all mentally prepped for my dumbbells workout (today is the arms day, y’all), she comes in with a clipboard and a paper and says ‘Lets do this challenge’. I was like ‘why ?’. She was like ‘why not?’ And then she says ‘I have belief in you. You can do it’. I did a eye roll and one more for good measure and told her that not to expect me to excel in it. I know all about their BS of positive and motivational talks. Been there, heard that a lot with my other instructor, and have done that to others too. There is no kidding me with that line, girl. Since the push ups were an issue for me, she replaced it with burpees. Now, I had no choice as to give it a try.

25 knee pushups

10 burpees

25 box jumps

50 full sit ups

50 skipping or jump rope

500 m running in the treadmill at 9 kmph speed and no gradient

I completed them all in 8.55 mins. She was very happy about that, even though there were better results than that. I told her that I am going home now that my workout for the day was over 😉 Once I got that done, I felt good. That wasn’t bad compared to the standard I held myself. I could have done better, if I had done some more practice at home or the previous day. But that’s all right. I made sure I maintained my form too. Box jumps literally tired me down and I had to slow down a bit when I was doing those. I used to hate burpees. May be still do, but at least when it came to this challenge I got that done. All in all I felt good after being challenged so suddenly and especially when I wasn’t mentally prepared. After that she told me that this was just my warm up and I had to do the day’s workout. 🙄  I had to cut two of my exercises from my day’s workout to be able to complete it on time and be back for work. Anyone want to give it a try? If you do, let me know how it went for you.

When I reached home, may be it was the feeling that I did good, I was craving for something very sweet. Like a Pavlova which was available on a fresh food site to order. But every single time I tried (and I tried for close to 5 times from different browsers), the page would error out the moment I select the sweet. Divine Intervention, you think ? I had to settle for some dates to satisfy my sweet craving for the day.

This photograph was taken during one of our Zumba workouts in a Music bar. Photo credits to a friend of a friend who was using my camera to try his photographic skills.Will be doing Zumba this weekend after a very long time. Getting excited already.