dianaschnuth

I slept funny last night, so the weird stiffness in my right shoulder blade and neck area limited the range of motion in my right hook. I also took (or invented) the low-impact option for moves like jumping jacks, and I skipped the abs session at the end of class.

Apart from that, though, class was awesome. Got sweaty, stayed in the groove, and the instructor stuck with drills and combinations we’d done before (which helps with the groove thing).

I also made a funny to some early-middle-aged runners in the locker room after class. They were comparing notes about how their bodies had changed after pregnancy: ribs and hips spreading, etc. I piped up on my way into the shower, “That’s the great thing about me being fat before I got pregnant: it didn’t wreck my body, because I’d already wrecked it myself!” I cracked them all up BAD

Self-deprecation is just one of my many talents.

Once upon a time, I used both Fitbit and DailyMile to log my fitness, for group classes and walks and runs and lifting and whatnot. Then I decided I was tired of logging things in multiple places, so I ditched DailyMile. With it, though, went any history of progress, as it included moods, free text, equipment, tagging, and other features that Fitbit doesn’t.

While I do track what I do and how much, I haven’t been tracking how it went. So, in an effort to a.) get my sorry butt to the fitness center more often and b.) remember what the heck I did there, I’m going to start logging the deets here.

For example, today’s kickboxing class was a good class overall — got my heart rate up, got in the zone — but since I’d tweaked my back while gardening on Saturday, I made sure to take the high impact stuff down a notch. Low-jacks instead of jumping jacks, normal squats instead of power squats, high-mark-time (marching-band style) instead of “jumping rope.” That doesn’t mean I took it easy, though: even when I was modifying moves, I tried never to phone it in. (We were all just about out of juice with 15 minutes still to go — including the instructor!)

I also noticed that my hip flexors were especially tight afterward, and I stretched as best I could after the traditional post-class ab crunch session.

Next time? Eat a better breakfast — a Pop-Tart and a latte didn’t cut it — and show up early enough to get my usual lower-body stretching done before class.

I’m kind of on a roll with weight loss and developing healthier habits. Let’s see if I can ramp up my activity, too.