Fit For Fall

I am starting a new challenge called 22 minute Hard Corps starting on Monday!  This challenge is similar to the 21 Day Fix Extreme where there are daily workouts, a meal plan, and shakeology.  Tomorrow I will be taking my before or "goodbye" pictures.  Summer was fantastic with A LOT of weddings and a trip to Europe!  I may have a bit more cushion post summer than pre summer.  While I like to look at it as a sign of a great summer, I would like to fit into all of my cute winter pants and sweaters :)

Get ready!

So for the next 8 weeks, I Stephanie Ann, pledge to do my daily workout, drink my daily shakeology, drink my daily 2.4 L of water, and follow my meal plan.

Phew.  Luckily the workouts are only 22 minutes long!  They will be super intense though!  Excited and nervous to start this next challenge and happy to have a few challengers taking the plunge with me.

☆ Stephanie Ann

22 Minute Hard Corps Challenge!!

I have had a thoroughly wonderful summer full of weddings, gardening, and enjoying the sunshine. Glasses of champagne, wedding cake, cocktail hour, evening beers, a trip to Europe, ice cream cones, skipping workouts to travel... Yep, I have definitely had quite the enjoyable summer! :)

Now that the weather is turning and the days are getting shorter, I am ready to jump back into my daily workout routine and really get my nutrition on point. My goal is to build good solid habits in time for the holidays! My next workout challenge will be focusing on portion control AND doing a 22 minute workout every day.

I would LOVE it if anyone would like to join me on this adventure and take the challenge of an 8 week long fitness and health journey! Do you want to be ready for the darker days and cold temperatures? Do you want to have built positive habits and daily routines before the winter blues hit? Do you dread the holidays and the decisions around food that you will have to make? Do you want to be well on your way to your New Year's resolution months before you officially make one? I know I do!

Winter, being cold and dark, is the most difficult season for me to be consistent with my health but also the most IMPORTANT for this to happen. I find it is super easy to let my physical health slide in the winter. My excuses run rampant! This year I plan to go all out this FALL in preparation for the lack of sunlight and warm temps that show up come December! I want to be ready for the holidays not stuck playing catch up afterwards.

If you are the type of person who also finds that winter can be a dark and dismal place, join me this FALL and take matters into your own hands. Let's be grateful for the pleasures of summer and use fall as a fresh new beginning. If you already feel like you are in a good space health wise but want to try something new, I'd also love for you to join the challenge as well!

Comment or message me for more details!

Note: The pics are from my 21 Day Challenge. This challenge will be 8 weeks long instead of 3 so I am SUPER EXCITED to see even more impressive results!!! :D

Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.

Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.  

I wish I could truly convey to you how these eleven words make me feel.  Sadly, I often find words and the English language can only bring us so far when it comes to describing thoughts and emotions.  I am using this as my Monday Motivation even though it is not your typical "Woohoo! Conquer the day!" message.  

Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.  

Beautiful.  I read that and I can just feel my bare feet against warm sand, feel the grains compacting and sliding underneath the soles of my feet.  Savoring every moment of contact between my foot and the earth below it.  It is such a simple phrase yet much of its meaning has been lost in modern day materialism and popular culture.  

Walk is if you are kissing the earth with your feet.  

The thoughts coming to my mind go beyond walking and into the philosophical.  Live as if you are embracing the world with your entire being.  It reminds me to get off of autopilot and take notice of what I am doing.  What I am feeling.  What I am taking in with my five senses.  

Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.  

I want every step I take to be a kiss between my feet and the earth.  I want every action I take to be an embrace between my soul and the world.  I do not want to miss any of it because I am simply going through the motions.  I want to live not just survive.  I want it all.

☆ Stephanie Ann

Stop beating yourself up.

My homework for the week is to stop beating myself up over things I do or do not get done during my day.  We can categorize our "To Do" list into three categories...

1. What we want to do: These are generally the "fun" activities through out our day.  Reading a book, taking a nap, watching some tv, wandering the internet, eating some ice cream, going out to dance/party etc.
2. What we should do:  These activities will vary from person to person based on their own outlooks of what they view as important or necessary.  For me things I "should" do include exercising the dogs, studying for personal training certification, cleaning the house, meal prep, planning the garden.
3. What we need to do:  These are the activities that we NEED to do in order to survive.  They can be simplified down to the bare minimum tasks that MUST be accomplished each day.  These tasks include things like eating, going to the bathroom, getting enough sleep, personal hygiene, and going to work.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I find that my "should" do and "need to" do categories often overlap ending up with many "should" items in the "need to" category.  When I then don't have enough time or do not accomplish these items I beat myself up about it!  One way to look at the distinctions is to look at an example such as cleaning.  What things do we need to keep clean, should we keep clean, and want to keep clean.  Things we NEED to keep clean include ourselves (personal hygiene) and our cooking areas (we don't want to end up with food poisoning).  If we neglect to keep these items clean our personal health and the well being of our family members can become jeopardized.  

Other household chores may not be as pivotal to our personal health, we can survive a few days without vacuuming (if you have allergies this may not be the best example), we aren't going to die if we don't do that load of laundry today.  Often these cleaning items are things we feel we "should" be getting done and sometimes slip into the category of "need to" get done.  It is important especially for me when my depression is the worst to recognize that it is OKAY to sometimes skip these or go a few extra days between them.  My world isn't going to end because the laundry is folded but not put away.  A lot of times when I don't do the "should" list items when I plan them out or "on time", I chastise myself for being lazy, for avoiding, for procrastinating.  If I don't do them again the next day, the self talk gets worse and worse as the days go by.  As that self talk gets worse, my motivation and my will to do those tasks gets smaller and smaller until they seem DAUNTING.  If I can hit the reset button on this cycle by recognizing some days won't be perfect and I won't get everything done, my mindset will be in a better place.  With my mindset in a better place, even with depression, getting those "should" items accomplished doesn't seem quite so impossible.  

The want items in terms of cleaning are a little harder to imagine but could include wanting to get a manicure, wanting to bring your car through the car wash so it is shiny and clean, wanting to hire someone to come do your cleaning for you, wanting to get your eyebrows done.  I'm not saying that we should avoid our wants at all.  I know that I need to incorporate the occasional want into my day to balance out accomplishing all of the needs.  If I need to play mental games with myself to accomplish some of my "need to" do list with a reward from my "want to" do list.  Awesome.  One example of this that doesn't have to do with cleaning but is currently something I am aiming for is if I follow my workout routine perfectly for 21 days, I am going to go get a massage! :)  Massages cost money, it will definitely be a treat but it gives me that extra motivation to really work towards my goal of committing to my workout routine.  

So, as I work on not mentally beating myself up this week over the smaller day to day things, I encourage you to also take a step back and notice if you are being especially hard on yourself in areas of your life where you could cut yourself some slack.  I'm making an effort to acknowledge when I successfully complete a task, even if it seems insignificant.  I want you to do the same.  One of the best ways to raise your self-confidence and self-esteem is through accomplishment.  If we can put the same amount of mind power into congratulating ourselves on what we DO rather than on what we fail to do, we are going to be in a better space mentally.  I know this is true, I've felt it before.  It is just a matter of forcing myself to recognize those small accomplishments, guiding my thoughts away from the negative reinforcement back to positive reinforcement.  Being mindful of my self talk.  Accepting my own limitations.  Smiling and living in the moment.

☆ Stephanie Ann

Fitness Facts Friday - What Exactly is a Muscle?

The right bicep muscle.

To start of Fitness Facts Friday, I've decided to explain what a muscle is.  As in, what is it made of, what does its structure look like, and how does it help me move my body.

Have you ever heard of fractals?  You know the pattern in a pattern in a pattern?  Like a fern or the Mandelbrot set?

Examples of Fractals.

Well a muscle reminds me a lot of a fractal in that if you zoom in on a muscle starting at the naked eye, the structure seems to repeat itself.  First with a bundle of muscle fibers, then with the muscle fiber itself which is a bundle of myofibrils.  Within the myofibrils live Actin and Myosin chains which interact to cause muscle contractions, aka when your muscle shortens itself or "flexes".  (I'm not going to get into the specifics of muscle contraction in this post)

Diagram of the structure of a muscle.

When your brain sends a signal to your muscle to contract it is actually sending a signal to each muscle fiber!  Depending on how many muscle fibers are called into action the force created by the muscle can be carefully controlled.  The main molecule that make up a muscle is protein!  Hence why when we eat meat, we are eating a lot of protein.  Essentially most meat that we consume are the muscles of other organisms.  Muscles attach to the bones of the body via tendons.  Let's talk about the bicep to really get an idea of how a muscle connects to the bones and how that enables use to move our skeleton.  Here is the anatomical view of the bicep:

The anatomy of the bicep.

As you can see the upper part of the bicep muscle attaches via tendons to the shoulder while the lower portion of the bicep muscle attaches to the lower arm, below the elbow.  When the muscle contracts, or shortens, the elbow acts as a pivot point and the lower arm is brought closer to the upper arm.  Take your arm right now and hold it out straight in front of you with your palm facing upwards.  If you want to lift your hand to touch your face, you are contracting your bicep muscle, the more you contract it, the closer your hand is to your face.  Pretty awesome stuff!  Of course the bicep is not the only muscle in the human body, in fact there are between 640-850 muscles in the human body!  Amazing!  These muscles range in type from voluntary (the skeletal muscles we use to walk around) to involuntary (the visceral muscles which control your inner organs) and cardiac (your heart).

Diagram of the muscles in the human body.

The main type of muscle that I want to focus on are the voluntary or skeletal muscles.  You know, the ones that help use pick those weights up and put them back down.  Some muscles have a counterpart muscle that acts in opposition to it.  An example of this is the hamstring and quads (blue/purple in the diagram above).  When the hamstring is flexed, the quads are stretched and when the quads are flexed, the hamstring is flexed.  Think of these opposing muscles as balancing one another to make sure our skeleton is not pulled to far in any one direction.  

The exercises that we do to get "in shape" can either use multiple muscle groups at once or focus on one muscle group at a time.  The diagram below lists the muscle group and several exercises that are associated with those muscles.  Next time you are sore and you are wondering what on earth you were doing that made that specific muscle hurt so bad, check out this infographic and try and figure out which exercise it was!  For example, my quads get sore if I do a lot of squats.  I hope you have enjoyed this mini lesson on what a muscle is!

☆ Stephanie Ann

Workout - Deck of Cards

All you need to do this workout is a little creativity and a deck of cards!  At my house, we have no shortage on decks of cards! 

So many options!

The first thing you will do is assign an exercise to each suit in the deck.  I like to choose at least 1 upper body exercise, 1 lower body exercise, and 1 core exercise.  For the fourth suit I pick an exercise that targets multiple muscle groups, burpees for example.  To make this super easy for you I've listed several exercises for each category!

Clubs (upper body)

• Push ups
• Tricep Dips
• Dumbbell Curls
• Dumbbell Row (includes the back in this one)
• Inverted Push ups
• Dumbbell Bench Press
• Dumbbell Fly

Diamonds (lower body)

• Squat Jumps
• Squats
• 1 Legged Squats
• Sumo Squats
• Calf Raises
• Hamstring Curl with a stability ball
• Mountain Climbers
• Squat Tuck Jumps

Hearts (core)

• Stomach Dippers
• Leg Raises
• Plank Jacks
• Side Plank Dips
• Side Crunches
• Russian Twist
• Stability Ball Crunches

Spades (multiple muscle groups)

• Burpees (with a push up!)
• Football runs with a drop down onto your stomach
• Burpees (with knee raises, no push up)
• Inchworm with a squat each time your feet touch your hands

Doing the Workout

To do the workout, pick one exercise from each category and you will do this exercise every time you flip a card of that suit.  Feel free to assign exercises not listed above when you are doing this yourself!

Clubs=Push ups

Diamonds=Squat Jumps

Hearts=Side Plank Dips

Spades=Burpees with knee raises.  

For reps you will do whatever the value of the card is.  For example if you flip the 7 of Hearts, you would be doing 7 Side Plank Dips on each side for that card.  Then flip the next card, let's call it the Jack of Spades, do 11 Burpees with knee raises.  Continue to flip cards and do the equivalent exercises and reps until you have done all 52 cards!  Super simple and super effective!  And you never know what is coming so you can't psych yourself out.  

If you want to make this harder on yourself add 10 reps to the value of each card.  This way an Ace becomes 11, a 2 becomes 12, a 3 becomes 13... a Jack becomes 21, a Queen becomes 22, and a King becomes 23.  You can also go through the deck more than once if you feel so inclined!  

☆ Stephanie Ann

Fitness Facts Friday

Hello all!

Welcome to what will become known as Fitness Facts Friday!  As part of my journey into the world of fitness and fitness coaching, I am studying to become certified as a personal trainer.  There are several reasons why I want to be certified as a personal trainer including but not limited to:

1. Increasing my knowledge of how the body works and how to maximize its capabilities
2. Have an official certification for my business 
3. Be able to apply the knowledge I learn to help others!

What will Fitness Facts Friday be?

An opportunity for me to share some of what I am learning through my studies with you!

I'm hoping to answer some questions people have about fitness and exercise along with giving some base knowledge.  Topics covered will include but won't be limited to:

• What exactly is a muscle?
• Why am I sore?  What is this lactic acid thing everyone always talks about?
• Will this exercise make my butt look big?
• How much protein do I really need?
• Using physics to maximize results
• Why do I have to eat well to see results?  Can't I just exercise?
• What benefits come from lifting weights?
• What benefits come from aerobic exercise?
• AND SO MUCH MORE!

I'm super excited to get this up and going next week :)  Make sure you check back next Friday to see what fun fitness fact I talk about first!  If you have any questions or want to know more about a specific topic, comment and I will look into it!  And remember:

☆ Stephanie Ann