This week wasn’t bad exercise-wise. Maybe I’m in better shape? I hope so. We began the class in the usual way, with a 10 minute jog. Then the instructor had us skip around the room. There’s a difference between skipping because you’re happy or being silly and being told to skip for a minute. You get tired!

Here’s what else we did:

1. Jumping jacks (again) but this time, we had an exercise band (basically a strong rubber band) around our feet. We did these for a minute. The band makes it harder to jump outwards, and therefore you work your leg muscles more than you would during regular jumping jacks. We did these for a minute.
2. Squats: This time we held the exercise band in our hands. While doing these, your arms should be outstretched in front of you with your elbows slightly bent (pretend you’re holding a beach ball). Each time we came up from the squat we would pull the band apart. We did this for a minute. I could really feel this in my shoulders.
3. Planks: We got into plank position (same as push up position – make sure your back is flat and your butt isn’t up in the air) and lifted one arm at a time up to shoulder height and back down again. The trick with this is to keep your abdominal muscles tight so that when you lift your arm up your hips don’t sway back and forth. We did these for a minute.
4. Then we repeated exercises 1-3.
5. Lunges were next. We did them backwards though. Instead of stepping forwards, we stepped backwards with one foot and put it behind the other one. To do these, start standing up with a weight in each hand (I used 5 lb), choose a leg to start with (lets say left leg) and step behind your right so they’re slightly crossed. You have to step far enough back so that when you bend your knees, they’re both at a 90-degree angle. When you’re down in the squat, do a bicep curl (start with your weights down at your sides, face your wrists up, pull we weights up slowly, and then lower them down slowly). We did these for one minute per leg.
6. Plank position again! This time we lifted each leg up so that it was level with the rest of our body (about a foot and a half off the ground) and squeezed our butts as well. Your butt should really hurt after doing all the squats from before. Once again, we spent a minute on these.
7. Last but not least, we got on our stomachs and put our arms and legs straight out. We lifted them off the floor so that all of our weight was basically on our chests. From here, we moved our arms out to the side (like an airplane), up in front of our heads (like superman), pulled our elbows towards our sides, and went into superman pose again. Up (superman), out (airplane), up (superman), in (elbows to sides). This whole sequence was repeated for a minute (all the while our feet were lifted up off the ground).
8. Then, steps 5-7 were repeated through for a second time.
9. At the end we did side planks; one on each side for 30 seconds, and then stretched to end the class.

-K