The day before Halloween!

Hey everyone,

Well, it's the day before Halloween, which is always a time with plenty of 'less-than nutritious' temptations - thus it was a perfect day for a workout to mitigate any treats we consume!  There are many different opinions and perspectives out there on nutrition.  Ours, in short, is to eat healthy the majority of the time, yet also enjoy life!  A life of deprivation and constantly avoiding things is not a lot of fun (nor would it be easy or overly sustainable).  Although working out doesn't give you a license to eat whatever you want, it certainly does help counteract the occasional treat.


At Halloween, we have a weakness for Hershey's O' Henry bars - they're so good...  To avoid too much temptation and/or over-indulging, we waited until today to buy the Halloween candy for the trick or treaters.  We got a single box, which we won't open until tomorrow.  We'll have a few ourselves as we hand them out to trick or treaters.  Then, the following day, one of us will bring the box into work, so that the temptation is removed from our house!

Another neat thing that we're trying out for the first time together is baking the seeds from our pumpkin (lightly sprinkled with salt).  They should be a tasty and healthy addition to our salads for the week.  Now, for the really important part of this post - check out the pumpkin that Tannys carved for our house:

For today's workout (and our last 'split' workout focused on a specific body part/group), we did a leg circuit.  We did three circuits, with a 2 minute rest in between.  We kept track of our time for each circuit, noticing a definite improvement between the first and second (with the third just slightly faster).  Our theory is that in the first circuit you're not as warmed up and familiar with the exercises.  By the second circuit, you're much more in the groove and can go faster.  By timing our circuits and pushing the intensity and pace, we were quite exhausted by the end, but it was a very efficient workout - about 25 minutes in total.

1. Alternating kettlebell deadlifts (Tannys 20kg, Alex 40kg)
2. Overhead squats (holding a kettlebell in one hand - switching it to the other side halfway through - Tannys 12kg, Alex 24kg)
3. Kettlebell Swings (Tannys 20kg, Alex 40kg)
4. Hip bridges
5. Overhead lunges (same as the overhead squats)
6. Pistol squats

Here are some photos, post-workout, to demonstrate a few of the exercises:

Alex demonstrating an overhead squat (note the extended arm for balance)

Tannys demonstrating an overhead lunge

Tannys at the start of a pistol squat (Note - these can be done on an elevated surface as below, or can be done on level ground.  You can use something to help balance yourself as you learn them.)

That's it for today.  We're still sick, so we plan on taking tomorrow off as a rest/recovery day.  Stay tuned this week for new posts as we launch into a 2 month trial of full-body workouts!

- Alex & Tannys