What's Your Favourite Exercise?

Busy mom fitness is tired. Today I took the day off intense exercise. I did a few shoulder stabilizers and abdominal exercises. I had 2 very intense max strength workouts the past 2 weeks and my body is tired. I will focus on metabolic training and mom fat loss more next week.

Today I have a question for all of you. What is your favourite exercise? It may be a love/hate relationship- meaning you love the results but hate the work. It may be your favourite form of exercise for stress relief. Weightlifting, dancing, yoga it's all fair game, just let me know.

My favourite type of exercise is weight lifting in a superset format. My favourite exercise right now is a combination barbell move that has a quicker learning curve than other barbell combinations. It is the full front barbell squat up to a overhead barbell pushpress (explosive shoulder press). You can perform this with dumbells as well. It is a total body combination and it is 2 exercises in one a squat and a shoulder press. This is a time efficient move. Give it a try, hold your dumbells shoulder level with your palms facing forward, perform a full range squat, explode out of the bottom of your squat and when you almost get to standing press the weights overhead. our body should be in full extension at the knees, hips and shoulders at the top of this move.

Let me know your favourite exercise, be specific if you want.

BUSY MOM FITNESS-Strength Experiment Day 3 and Berpie Pullup Video

Today I performed my workout and attempted my max lifts on the barbell Clean and total number of Berpie Pullups. This is the third week of my 6 week mini experiment. I have 2 control athletes that have been posting at http://babybumpfitness.ning.com and I am the test subject.

My conditions for the past few days have been brutal at best. This week my husband is away travelling so I have no relief after a day of training clients that begins at 5am. I did a small Tabata busy mom fat loss workout on Monday that took 15 minutes. On Tuesday I performed a day of just core training. My nutrition has been good this week so far and I feel well. My sleep has been BRUTAL. Monday night I was disturbed by the baby at 1:45am, I was up at 5am for work and went to bed at 9pm last night. I woke again last night to a screaming toddler at 10:45pm, she came into my bed for a cuddle and sleep as her nose was stuffy, she sleeps sideways. She woke periodically during the night and the baby woke me at 2:30am so I had to get up and comfort her as well. We were up at 7am this morning as I start work later.

FITNESS MOM Max Strength Experiment Week 3- my workout today after brutal sleeps. Dynamic warmup including thoracic mobilization moves, arm and leg swing, inchworm and lunges. I performed 2 sets of berpie pullups. I was able to improve and complete a 6 this week-I cut myself off after this as my right shoulder has been nagging me. I performed barbell Clean warmups and my weight increased by 5 lb for a 2 rep max. So there you go - good nutrition, bad sleep and med-high emotional stress still yielded a small improvement this week in my max strength experiment.

Here is a small video of a berpie pullup-I don't know what happened to my camera woman- too much wine maybe. I have been posting my workouts since I started this blog a few months post partum. You can track the progressions to get to an exercise like this. Any questions please ask- I would be glad to help. It doesn't matter where you start- it's where you end up that COUNTS. You will notice there are some root moves such as the front plank from the furious 5 in the berpie pullup exercise.

MOM FITNESS Dancing Queen

Every night after dinner my 3 year old asks to be excused from the table and goes to turn on the TV. We have ended this, "NO TV, you can listen to music or play with your toys". My daughter out of her own volition has decided to DANCE, as we have music on anyway during dinner. She is discovering how to move her body, feel the music, amusing herself and is being physically active. She needs this for her own physical development. Childhood obesity is on the rise and most children are not getting any sort of physical activity. Studies have shown children that have a physical outlet are able to concentrate and learn better in a structured environment. So I ask you, why are many schools cutting physical education programs, so the children can be more distracted and learn less? All I know is I cannot rely on others and I have taken it upon myself to make physical activity a part of my daughters life everyday. Check out the video clip of her dancing.

Yesterday I had a great barbell workout and it was the first weight lifting I had done since getting over the flu. I took 1-2 minutes of recovery between exercises. My busy mom fitness Workout- dynamic warmup, barbell full front squats 2 sets, barbell push presses, good mornings, deadlifts 2 sets, Romanian deadlifts 3 sets max weight, lateral band walks, band assisted pullups 2 sets, stretching. I had a client cancel at the gym and had time to do a slower workout and spent more time on my static stretching routine.