Hey friends! I hope you enjoyed last month’s challenge and it inspired you to get creative! Speaking of inspiration, I’m really going to need some this month during my fitness challenge. Words like run, gym, workout, and cardio are not in my vocabulary. In fact I usually avoid those things at all costs. It’s not that I’m a couch potato, it’s just that me and working out have never gotten along in my 23 years of life. I just don’t get why people put themselves through it. But deep down I know that fitness is important, helps you have a healthy life and and all that. So I decided that for the month of August (hottest month of the year, what was I thinking?) I would suck it up and attempt to dive into the world of fitness. Each week I’ll post a recap of the workouts I did each day to measure my progress (or lack thereof, but hopefully not!).

For six days out of the week, I will be doing morning workouts at home and increase the difficulty each week. This week, I’ll spend my mornings doing:

• 15-20 Lunges
• 20 Sit ups
• 10 Pushups (ashamed to say they will have to be the girly ones for this first week)
• 25 Mountain climbers
• 45 sec Plank
• 15-20 Squats

At night time, I will mix up the workouts a bit!

• Monday: Gym day! I hate going to the gym because I just know I look like an idiot on every single piece of equipment. But since the college students aren’t back from summer yet, I don’t feel too awful using the school’s little gym.
• Tuesday: Nike+ Training Club app. Many moons ago (as in freshman year) I used to do these workouts with a friend in my dorm – she was also afraid of the gym – and they were actually pretty helpful! It’s a great app with lots of different workouts that has instructional videos and reads out the exercises as you go. Check it out!
• Wednesday: Walk/jog the track. The thing I hate more than the gym is running. It just is exhausting and I have basically zero stamina so it gets real discouraging real quick. But I’m doing it for you, blog followers!
• Thursday: Nike Training Club again. I already created my plan for the next month and will post about it as I go along!
• Friday: Fun day. The one type of exercise I do love is dancing. I’ve done it my entire life and it’s one of my favorite activities. I will be looking up and learning different instructional dance videos on youtube because they are so much fun! And I’ll post the links in my blogs.

Goals by the end of the month (mostly set by my husband):

• Drink 2 full liters of water per day (the amount of water I normally drink can be found in my coffee each morning)
• 10 pushups without stopping
• 2 sets of 50 sit ups with 1 minute break
• 2 sets of 50 lunges with 1 minutes break
• 2 sets of 50 mountain climbers with 1 minute break
• 2 minute plank
• 40 squats
• Run a mile under 9 minutes
• Stairmaster 100 flights
• Cycle 5 miles
• Master 3 dances

Although this month is going to be a real challenge for me, I really want to prove to myself and to other people who don’t like working out that it can be done! And it’s always easier when you have a buddy, so I’d love if you would do this challenge with me! See you next week!