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Why I try to mix it up

There are various reasons why you might not lose the weight you want or tone up as much as you want, and one of those is that you continue doing the same class/routine every week for weeks on end. Our body likes a challenge and if it gets used to doing one thing, it's going to get complacent. Those first few sessions you'll see a difference, but as your muscles get used to doing something, they effectively stop trying as hard if that's all they get to. Basically your muscles get lazy and bored.

So with this in mind, yesterday I got myself a free pass for the local leisure centre and decided to try out a few different classes, to give make sure I was keeping my body challenged. And boy did I challenge it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing 3 hour long classes and a swim in one day - slight overkill, but I wanted to make the most of a rare client-free morning and the chance to do whatever classes I wanted for free. I'd be silly to just do one eh?!

So first up was BodyPump. Now I have tried this, but it was about 12 years ago, so working out what weights I needed for what exercise was a bit time consuming. Some of the leg exercises I could've gone higher but some of the arm ones I over estimated what I could lift and I think I may pay for that with achy shoulders tomorrow! All in all, the class was great - we had adequate rest periods, good instruction and although you could feel the burn, it never felt like you were doing a million reps as we moved from slow to fast etc.

I had a break between classes so a quick 20 lengths of the pool cooled me down and relaxed me.

Next up was pilates. Now again I'm not new to pilates but bar the odd class and online videos, I haven't done it regularly for about 5 years. We had a very well-built eastern European bloke take this one, which I wasn't expecting. Despite his looks, he was a really nice bloke and he got us breathing properly and came round with corrections as we went through. I won't lie, it was a pretty tough class, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Then, after an afternoon with clients, I headed back for an evening session of Aquaphysical's Float Fit. I've been wanting to try this class for ages. It's kind of like an enlarged lilo, but somewhat more sturdy. You're hooked to a line underwater so that you don't float off down the pool, but you still move enough to make the surface unstable. As you may know, the more unstable the base, the harder your core has to work to balance, so this class is brilliant for core work. You do basic moves such as lunges, squats, mountain climbers, bicycle legs, but the instability makes it much harder than on dry land. And the fact that i'd hammered my body for 3 hours earlier, meant my muscles were exhausted at this point. Naturally it would be fairly boring to do static moves, so the instructor mixed it up with jumping squats, single leg lifts, 180 degree twists, especially so the change of wipeout increased. I was quite proud as I wiped out only 3 times! Great class but would like to try when I haven't done loads of exercise prior!

So, all in all a great day. Lots of new things tried and although my muscles may not thank me tomorrow, in the long run they will and I will certainly be going back and doing more of these classes.

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