At Home Workouts

This morning's breakfast was a good one! When we were visiting my family in Vermont a few weeks ago, we made sure to pick up a few of our favorite goodies at the local shops, including some amazing handmade whole grain bread at The Red Hen Bakery and some freshly ground cashew butter at the Hunger Mountin Co-Op - my favorite healthfood store of all time. They came together for a quick morning meal today.

I toasted one slice of the grain bread and topped half with cashew butter and the other half with some homemade organic blueberry jam I made last summer. We're on the last jar of blueberry jam :(, so I'm planning to do some canning this weekend. I'm thinking some homemade orange marmalade may be in order?

On the side I had a glass of skim milk for some extra protein, as well as a cup of Green Mountain coffee. My fav! My mom actually picked up a bag of eggnog flavored coffee for us at the Green Mountain outlet when I was home, so I tried that for the first time this morning; even though it's a holiday flavor, I'm still in winter mode and I thought it might be good on this dreary morning. Unfortunately, it wasn't that great. It was a little too spicy and eggnog-y for my liking. I managed to drink the whole cup since I was too lazy to brew another batch, but I don't think it'll be making another appearance any time soon.

After breakfast and some playtime with Riker and the pup, I put Riker down for a nap and got started on my workout. Since it's raining this morning, I stuck with an indoors exercise routine. I started with a quick whole body workout I found on Pinterest to get my heart rate going. There was no "Wednesday" routine, so I did Tuesday's instead:

Source

Note: I actually had never heard of Russian Twists (I've done the exercise a million times, just never heard it called that), so I looked it up on YouTube. Here's a great video explaining how to do them properly if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObEPJ_6w5E Turns out my technique was a little off and I needed a tutorial!

After that, I completed an upper body workout that I based on a P90X shoulders & arms routine I love. I changed up some of the exercises and did two rounds of each move. I used to be able to do all these exercises with 10 or 15 pounds, but I had to reduce a lot of my weights when I was pregnant with Riker (carrying an extra 20 pounds during the third trimester really got my heart rate going even with small weights), so I'm still working on building up my strength. I thus did each move with only 5 pound weights, except the triceps - I still have strength in those muscles, so I was able to use 10 pounds.

I put my gym membership on hold and am doing all my workouts at home right now since I have Riker with me. I'm scraping the barrel for new workouts since they took Exercise TV off cable, so if you have any at-home workouts you'd like to share, I'd love to hear about them!