Halloween Saturday Morning Women's Boot Camp workout

Happy Halloween everyone! To start out our Halloween, myself and the ladies of Lightning Fitness had an EXCELLENT morning boot camp class. Everyone was sweating buckets, including myself.

For today's workout, I incorporated Tabata Rounds, which are work-sets of 20 seconds work with 10 seconds rest for 2 straight minutes. I used the GymBoss Timer pictured about to keep time. These rounds might not sound hard, but, trust me, they were. Everyone was loving the challenge in a sadistic, love-hate kind of way.... (and, I didn't tell the ladies this, but I actually had them work for 23 seconds instead of just 20 :)... I know, I'm evil).

Here's what we did: Following a 15 minute dynamic warm-up we moved to Tabatas, alternating an upper body exercise with a lower body exercise for the 2 minutes:

1) Dips or shoulder press (I only had a limited amount of DBs for all my ladies, 1/2 did bench dips and the other did shoulder press. They then switched for each round).
2) Jump Squats
3) Push-ups (on toes or knees - just as long as form was good - i.e., elbows were tucked in and butt was down)
4) Speed Skaters
5) Bent over rows (with DBs - we used anything from 15 to 30 lbs each hand)
6) Split squat jumps
7) Walking push-ups or Dive bomber push-ups
8) Burpees

Then, rest for 2 -4 minutes (we really needed it.... the rounds were killer) and repeat 5 times.

For myself being 20 weeks pregnant, I did pretty good considering. And, I wasn't the only pregnant woman in the class - my girlfriend Sandy was in the class and she's 17 weeks along. Both of us were feeling it - for me: the hardest part was catching my breath because baby likes to take my oxygen. So, on the third round I only did every other exercise and used that time to ensure everyone was doing the exercises correctly (like the push-ups, bent over rows, dive-bomber or walking pushups). I really needed that break and so did Sandra - she also did the same thing on round three.

The coolest feedback from the ladies was from the two who do triathlons. Both of them commented that the class was just like hard sprint workouts and much harder than the long distance running they do. And, they hardly do sprint workouts because they're so hard.

After we felt like our lungs reached their maximum, we moved onto a core/strength workout for 15 minutes and then did 5 minutes of stretching a cool down. It was a great morning and we all felt great.

Following that workout, my girlfriend came in the gym and her, Sandy and I did a bit more light weight training for about 30 minutes. We used this time to have a good gabbing session talking about "girl" stuff and baby stuff.

I hope everyone also had a great Saturday morning. Enjoy your Halloween night and try not to eat too much chocolate!

In health, Cassandra