30 Day Shred

It’s been around 4 weeks now since I’ve trained ‘properly’. Between a cold, twisted ankle x 2 and a trip to New York my schedule has been very much disrupted. My body definitely knows about it and a week of eating out in New York has done very little to help the situation.

I am doing well on my ‘Back to basics’ approach with Thinking Slimmer – the messages in the Slimpod are definitely kicking in again and I’m starting to feel the benefits and I know that the weight/inch loss will inevitably follow.

My ankle is on the mend and hopefully I’ll be getting back to my regular running. But I’m impatient and I want to give my body a kick start to get back to where it was 4 weeks ago.

I heard about the 30 Day Shred from Sian of Dashing Divas who recommended it to me as a great home work out. It features Jillian Michaels who is the trainer from the Biggest Loser USA and promises to get you ‘shredded’ in 30 days.

The DVD was only £4.99 on Amazon so I decided to buy it and take a look. The 30 day programme is a set of 3 progressively more difficult workouts, each based on Jilllian’s 3,2,1 technique. 3 minutes of strength, 2 minutes of cardio, 1 minute of abs repeated 3 times.  Each one is only around 25 mins long once you’ve added in a brief warm up and cool down/stretch so pretty easy to fit into even the most busy of schedules.

I’ve been waiting to start the programme until my ankle was feeling better and last night decided that today would be the day I would start. So I set my alarm, got out of bed early and got ready to start my 30 day shred.

I had watched the Level 1 schedule through a day or so ago to familiarise myself with the moves. It moves quite fast so I’d recommend doing that if you’re thinking about starting the programme. To be honest as I was watching I was thinking, “that looks OK” – lots of strength and abs moves that I’m familiar with from Powerplates classes and some straight forward looking cardio but nothing particularly scary.

However, it’s the combination of all those different moves which seems to be the powerful thing here. I can’t remember the last time I sweated so much from 20 minutes of exercise! I managed to do pretty much everything on Level 1 – modifying some of the cardio moves to take account of my ankle – my jumping jacks weren’t as enthusiastic as they could have been for example.

Jillian and her ‘helpers’ use hand weights for the workouts which I don’t have so I used two bottles of recovery milkshake that were in my fridge which seemed to work quite well. I’ll invest in some weights though as I suspect I’ll want something heavier with time.

So Day 1 done and it was good – challenging but fun and over and done with quickly which I like.

I’ve decided to keep a diary of how I get on with this. I’ve taken my measurements so I can compare before and after. Fingers crossed it will give my body the kick it needs