Jillian Michaels is kicking my butt.

Winter has the tendency to be become my least active season. It is hard to get motivated to move when it only seems fitting to sip coffee underneath a blanket. So, to begin this new season of summer, my husband and I completed the workout video by Jillian Michaels, "30 Day Shred". The term shred alone is slightly scary, and seems to promise physical pain. I assure you all however that while we did stick to the 30 day plan, we are far from ahh..."shredded".

It has been fun to do this together everyday, even if half of the time is spent trying not to laugh as we struggle with some of the moves. For instance, let's just be honest here-I was horrible at push ups. I always thought my ability to carry all the groceries up to our third floor apartment in one trip was impressive, but I guess this strength doesn't carry over to push up abilities.

Anyway, since we finished up the "shred" before leaving for the Black Hills, we decided to treat the time away as our break from the workout. Now we've started another Jillian Michaels' video, "Ripped in 30". And while I doubt I will be ripped in 30 days, I can definitely tell that I have more strength, endurance, etc. compared to when we started with the shred over a month ago. We try to get up and do it in the morning when my husband has the day off or if he works later in the day. Otherwise, we do it when he gets home from work. (I will never work out at 4 in the morning, it's not even an option)

It has been great to do this together. There are definitely days where one of us is not motivated enough to do the workout, but once you see the other person getting ready it's not like you are going to just sit on the couch and watch them, right? So you begrudgingly say, "fine, I'll do it too..."

We have a few friends that are doing the same videos or have at least done portions of them, so on occasion we go on Jillian rants talking about how much this certain exercises are the worst or how pathetic we are at push ups and holding the plank for even 30 sec. (Okay that last part is just me...)

Back to the workout-
We have a pretty good system set up. I'm in charge of getting us both large glasses of water that we drink in between gasping for air during the cardio sessions. Ben is in charge of setting up the playlist of music on his computer. You can only listen to Jillian Michaels so many times, so at this point we listen to her the first time we do a new session and then she is muted after that. We have this love/hate relationship with her most of the time.

After our workout we sometimes go for a nice two mile walk around our neighborhood. I enjoy this time together, because even though we are often "together" in our apartment, it is nice to get away from computers, phones, etc and have no distractions for the duration of our walk.

We just finished the first week of the Ripped series this afternoon. Tomorrow is our day off, and our muscles are already celebrating this. The bad news is that we move on to the second phase of the work out on Tuesday. Usually it goes like this:

day 1 of phase: desperately trying to keep up with her as you try to copy all the moves.
day 2 of phase: I think I need to just lie here on the ground for awhile.
day 3 of phase: okay that went a little better.
day 4 of phase: okay I lied, it didn't get any better.
day 5 of phase: getting the hang of it, I can breathe now.
day 6 of phase: tomorrow is our day off and I finally feel like this isn't killing me.
day 7 of phase: put the dvd case away, I don't even want to look at her face today.

Then you start the next phase and the cycle of days starts all over again. haha, great. I'll keep you updated on our new 30 day goal. If you are interested in checking out any of these videos I will post links below for Amazon. I've seen both the videos at Target too. You could start doing either of the videos first, Shred or Ripped, but I would recommend starting with the Shred one. It seemed to start out easier when compared to week one of the Ripped video.

30 Day Shred
Ripped in 30