Want to feel like a wuss while lifting 3 pounds?

Hi, I'm Sara, and I'm a magazine junkie. If it's geared towards women, chances are good that I'll read it. Well, that's not entirely true. I don't like the fashion magazines, and I can do without the pseudo-fashion/how-to-be-a-sex-object ones, and I stay away from the ones that loudly profess on their covers things like "Lose 40 Pounds by Blinking!" So I guess to make that a more accurate statement I should say, "Hi, I'm Sara, and I'm a magazines-that-I-like junkie."

It just so happens that most of the magazines that I like are diet/health/fitness related. Big surprise I know. I'll give you a minute to recover from the shock. Feel better now? Good.

In this month's Self magazine, there is an arms workout that hurts me. It's by Madonna's and Gwyneth's trainer, Tracy Anderson. We don't get real TV here, so I didn't see Gwyneth on Oprah, but I did read some blog analyses of the interview, more specifically her trainer's assertion that no woman should lift a weight heavier than 3 pounds. Like most of the discussions of it that I read, I basically thought the woman was, er, wrong. But then I saw this workout in Self and decided to give it a try (think what you will about Madonna, Gwyneth, and/or their trainer, you can't deny they all have great arms).

Here it is:

Sculpt A-list Arms Fast!

It says to use 3-pound weights, but all I have at home are 2.5 (they're weight plates for dh's barbells; the smallest hand weights I have are 8-pounders)(yes, I am just that tough)(no, really)(stop laughing, Holly) and the gym's weights are in kilograms, so I can either go with 1 kg (which is 2.20462262 pounds) or 2 kg (which is 4.40924524 pounds). I've used the 2.5 lbs at home and the 2 kgs at the gym and the take on both is this: Ow.

This is a good workout, especially for your shoulders. I don't think it works my triceps all that well, so I've been doing extra sets of tricep exercises as well, and by the end of both, my arms are spent. If I were more concerned with building my biceps more, I might add in some exercises specifically targeting those, too, but right now I'm not.

I'm interested to see what the rest of her workout would be like, considering I was, er, wrong about the arms portion of it. Too bad I'm cheap. I can't bring myself to pay $30 for her DVD.

Go try the workout, and tell me what you think. Be sure to watch the accompanying video, because a couple of the exercises made no sense at all to me until I did.

The Dog Ate my DVD Player

I very much wanted to complete Sara's inspired "Do an Exercise DVD Every Diddly Darn Day of August" challenge. Really, I did. But you see, one day in August I was baking my cousin's wedding cake when something terrible happened. The second tier of this wedding cake was supposed to be strawberry flavored. "No problem," I thought. I've made this recipe dozens of times. So I whipped up the cake batter, filled the pans and popped them into my trusty, preheated oven. I set the timer, then immediately began washing the dishes. Ha! Just kidding--I left the dishes to "soak," and turned to more important tasks like Googling my name (turns out I'm a fairly famous Harlequin novelist). Twenty minutes into the baking/Googling, I smelled a smell--not the fruitily fragrant smell of baking strawberry cake, but the acrid smell of a big fat burning mistake. With a heavy heart (it eats a lot of bacon), I opened the oven door, sending smoke spewing into the kitchen by way of my face (*cough choke sputter*). I found cake batter flowing out of the pans and onto the oven floor, where it was quickly turning into little mounds of carbon cake and creating the aforementioned billowing smoke. I turned off the oven, and began scraping the mess out of the oven, hoping that I could continue to bake the batter left in the pans if I was able to get the oven to stop smoking. (I'll save you the suspense--it didn't work.) Meanwhile, the smoke detector began to beep, sending the parakeets into noisy conniptions and causing my 3-year-old to start crying at a pitch several octaves higher than the detector. (I have yet to have my life saved by a smoke detector, but they've caused me to age 5 years on more than one occasion.) My husband walked in the door at this moment and asked, "What is going on? And why haven't you opened a window?" (see illustration). I responded the way any reasonable woman would, by throwing a handful of burning cake at him. (Hey! He happens to like burnt cake.) I missed him by a mile (I'm not good at sports [even those that involve cake] on the best of days, let alone in stressful smoky situations) and the cake landed on the dog's head. He (the dog) hardly noticed, as he was busy chewing the dickins out of my DVD player. So now you know why I wasn't able to complete the exercise DVD challenge or write in this blog for months. Thanks for understanding. 

I don't seem to be capable of being clever right now

I've been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to think of a good way to tell you that I did a DVD again today, but I got nothin'.

So.

I did a DVD again today.

Bee tee dub, Mari Winsor also says "pellow" instead of "pillow." She sure can bring the pain though.

Putting Cal Ripken to Shame

Yes, that's right--two days in a row of doing a DVD.

I wonder when Guinness is going to call?

I blame Andrea

Hi! I hurt. Oh, and guess what (chicken butt)(sorry, couldn't resist; deep down I'm still 9-years old)! I did a DVD today! Today = 11pm. Hence, the pain.

I had it niggling (yes, that's a word; if I said it then it's a word) in the back of my head today that I needed to do it, but didn't quite get to it. I went hiking with my family this morning, and I rode my stationary bike this afternoon, and I went swimming this evening, but still no DVD. Honestly, by the time we got back from swimming, I had completely forgotten. But then when I was talking online with my mom, my inbox dinged and like the Pavlovian dog that I am, I checked my e-mail. It was Andrea's comment from my last post telling me that she had done a DVD and that I darn well better have had, too! Ok, was much nicer about it (and funnier), but that was the gist.

So here I am. It's almost midnight, I'm drenched in sweat, and I hurt. But I did what I said I was going to do, so I feel great.

I guess what I meant by the title of this post was, "Thanks, Andrea."

DVDVDVDVDVDVDDDDDDDD D D D d d d d

Wow. That was exhausting. Then again, I'm easily exhausted. I alternate housework with napping. Dishes, nap, fold laundry, nap, organize the rubber band drawer, nap. Etc.
So Sara...

Oh no! They're wearing ACID WASHED JEANS (I'm watching So You Think You Can Dance). Acid washed jeans are an abomination and if they reappear in the teen fashion vocabulary...bye bye all that is decent and good.

What was I talking about? DVDs. Exercise DVDs, to be precise, and Sara's evil plan to make me do things that are good for me. So maybe she's not quite up with the Donald Trump level of tyranny (yet), but she seems to be honing her skills. Lucky me!

Nigel Lythgoe just said, "You DO have the biggest bum in the competition." If I had a nickel for every time a reality TV judge has said that to me...
He was talking to a guy, thank goodness (I guess).

Back to the DVDs.

We were supposed to start our exercise-DVD-a-day-every-day-except-Sunday-until-the-end-of-August goal this past Saturday. Sara has been on target every day. I kind of managed to forget to start until Monday.

Monday: I did Winsor Pilates Buns and Thighs workout. I whined and whimpered the whole time, but I worked all my buns and thighs. Mari Winsor, creator of the famous Winsor Pilates workout video empire is a wee bit scary and elvin (elfish?) and she says "albow" for "elbow." It kind of makes me cringe. Fortunately, there were no instances of the dreaded albow during the Buns and Thighs DVD.

Tuesday: I did this random low-budget stretching exercise program I TiVOed off a bottom-of-the-barrel PBS-that's-not-PBS channel. It's called Classical Stretch: the Esmonde Method. It's a series. A poorly produced series. However, the instructor seemed to know what she was doing. I was not aware before I started that this particular episode was designed for chronic back pain sufferers. I am not in the chronic back pain club (though I hear they throw great parties [just don't ask them to help you move]), but I joined in the fun anyway and got a decent stretch out of the 30 minutes.
My favorite part: the instructor stumbled a little and said, "Pardon me. I sprained my ankle last week--I was rushing to get an eclair off the buffet table and I tripped." No kidding!

Wednesday: Um. It's 12:18pm and I've been blogging for the past hour. I'm not going to do a DVD tonight. Yeah, yeah--boo and hiss all you want. I will accept your derision gracefully and possibly get my act together tomorrow.

So far this week, I've done a whole 50 minutes of formal exercise! That's 50 more minutes than I've done in the past...oh...2 months. No joke.
Hard to believe I was working out six times/week a few years ago.

The Things I Do

Behold the trials I endure in order to exercise:

You want a tyrant? Check out the giant toddler who thinks the TV is only for his personal use for viewing The Little Einsteins. (Though you should know that I'm only indulging him because we are still waiting for our household goods to get here, and the boy has little-to-no toys.) Yes, that is a toy cat in between his toes. He's a kooky tyrant.
These are what I have to use as handweights. They are also useful for hydrating post-workout (if I did it during then I'd throw off the balance, see).
So because the TV is dominated by children's programming, I have to drag this big ol' transformer (seriously, the things weighs probably 20 pounds) into my room so that I can plug in...
...the portable DVD player so that I can workout to a little Tamilee Webb in my bedroom. I did one session of I Want Those Arms and one of I Want Those Abs. I'm quite certain that things like lifting feathers or inhaling are going to be quite impossible tomorrow.
And this has nothing to do with anything; I just think it's cool. This is where I was tonight:
Yeah, that's the sunset on the Nile.

Tyrants all

There I was at 11:50pm tonight--tired, weary, sleepy and tuckered out (I have a thesaurus widget, do you?) when I realized I had to do an exercise DVD before I could go to bed. Why? Why would I do such a thing when I was so exhausted, drained and pooped? Because Sara MADE me. Sure, she's like a garillion miles and 9 or 10 time zones away, but she has powers. Scary, scary powers. I did three whole hours of yard work this morning (at one point sweat dripped off my nose--that's how fatigued, zonked and wasted I was). Surely, you think, that would be enough to satisfy Sara's sadistic whims...but no, it was not. 

So I did the stupid, moronic and doltish DVD--all 20 hideous, gruesome and repellant minutes of it. And now my legs hurt, ache and smart. I hope Sara is happy, gleeful and buoyant.

Next thing you know she'll be taxing my tea and hostily taking over my corporate empire. 

P.S. Photos (L to R): George III of England, Donald of Manhattan, Sara of the Fertile Delta