Fitness Update

Hey all!

It’s time for some real commitment fitness posting. We all posted our goals awhile back, and for the most part I did a lot of “working out” in the form of several different dance classes that incorporated various forms of exercise. Here’s a rundown of what I would do in a week:

Monday
Intermediate/Advanced ballet for an hour and a half. 

This class works as an all-over body workout focused mainly on core, butt, and legs, but also works your back, shoulders, and arms in a less extreme way. The class included a combination of cardio and strength exercises in the form of barre and center work.
Barre consisted of plies, tendues/degages, ronde jambs, fondu/developes, frappe, and turns designed to warm up, strengthen, and stretch calf, thigh, ankle, feet and core muscles. Center work is comprised of petit and grand allegro made up of turns, leaps, jumps, tendue, and adagio.

Tuesday
Intermediate ballet/pointe for an hour and a half

This class is the same as Monday’s class excepting less strenuous forms of barre and center work. It also included pointe work in the last ten minutes of class where we did small variations of the barre and center work en pointe, adding extra stress to ankle, legs, and core.

Modern for an hour 

Modern begins with an exercise to warm up the feet; a combination of popping your heel, plies, tendues/degages, and small developes and envelopes (de-vell-up-ays and en-vell-up-ays) facing forward, feet in parallel and then turned out. After that we move to a series of plies in first-fifth ballet positions, facing a different direction with every new position. Following these exercises we’ll do a variation of turns, rolls, and other modern movements and then learn our dance.

Wednesday
 Rest day 

Thursday
Jazz for an hour 

Warming up we would jog, skip, or chasse for a minute, high knees for thirty seconds, kick butts for thirty seconds, and jumping jacks for thirty seconds and repeat it three times. Then we would move into a series of stretches, followed by a differing arm or leg work out that we would change every couple of weeks and often a series of squats. Sometimes we would finish this off with butt/hip isolations and a coordination exercise.
After the workout we did complicated combinations of turns, leaps, kicks, and whatever else she decided to throw at us that day, and then our dance.

Lyrical for an hour 
Intense cardio, arm, and leg work out that we started with various forms of crunches, pull backs, and “c-tuck” hovers. We would go on to do kicks, plies, and stretches, and finished with inner thigh leg press exercises, lying toe touches, butt exercise, plank into push-ups, and lower back strengthening/stretching. After the initial work out we would do combinations of turns and leaps and then our dance.

 Friday
Ballroom for two or three hours, depending on the week. 

This depended entirely on the willingness of the participants to focus that day on whether or not we accomplished much dancing. I’d usually end up doing several intense swing dances and waltzing before I left though.

Saturday and Sunday are designated rest days cuz I usually didn’t end up doing anything those days towards actual “working out”.

I feel like that took more effort mentally to write up than it did to actually do it. Anyway, I had pretty dang good abs, firm thighs, butt, and arms from doing those exercises consistently. Stay tuned for a post about my fitness challenge I've come up with that will list specific exercises with reps and everything listed!

~La vie est belle, Bri~