For the past week, I’ve been working on swapping my front room with my back room.  I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile – over a year – but I kept running into resistance from other family members (..ahem… DH).  But after some more arm twisting, we agreed to swap the rooms.  Before the move, my front room – the room people walked into when they came in the front door – housed my computer, the Wii and Dan’s toys.  It was usually a big mess.  It was not an easy room to walk into every day nor was it a room conducive to having people sit down when they came over.  Typically people would stand around at the front door and stare at my big mess.  lol!   I was just tired of it.

I took before photos – but I took them on my regular camera and for some reason my laptop isn’t reading my SD card this morning.  The drive isn’t even coming up.  The SD card is working because my camera recognizes it and usually my laptop recognizes it fine.  Not going to be good if my SD reader is bad on my laptop.  So I have no before photos to show you… only photos of my work in progress…the photos below were taken on my iPhone as I went along and are quite blurry.  I have an older blog post (opens in new window) that has two photos of what my office and front door could get like although they weren’t this bad when I started my move…it’s always nice to have a point of reference. lol!

DAY 1 – Tuesday – The plan

The first thing I did was put together a planning sheet of where everything was going to go. I’m usually pretty good at visualizing things like this in my head… but I will still plan out diagrams on paper and work things out from there.  I try to make my diagrams as close to scale as I can but they aren’t perfect.

This was my original new front room layout.  It stayed exactly how I planned it out.

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Back at the beginning of July, Rick and I started the P90X workout from Beachbody.  I had seen infomericals for this program a few times over the past 6 months and wanted to try it.  I knew it would be tough and I wouldn’t be in the best starting shape.  However, the idea that the workout was all about weights and muscle confusion – and had a workout style more like what I was looking  for – really peeked my interest.

After the first week of the program, I showed Rick and told him I thought we should do it together.  We both need to lose weight and are quickly approaching the BIG 4-0 number (which as Rick kindly reminds me often, I’ll hit it first).  Our bodies have slowed considerably during the past 10 years and I felt (and still do) that if we don’t try to get our weight and eating habits under control now, it’ll just get that much harder as we get older.  Rick agreed and so we started working out daily – together.

Every night when he comes home from work, we put in the next CD and workout.  At first, I thought this would screw up our dinner schedule – since the workouts last usually an hour.  But over time, I figured out that I could plan dinners around the specific workout.  So for instance, on plyometric days, I’ll make something like Chili that can cook unattended while we work out.

Over the next 60 days, we developed into the daily pattern of working out regularly.  Friday is our day off.  If you read the P90X website or forums, you’ll see it mentioned over and over that P90X is not supposed to be a weight loss program.  It’s suppose to be a muscle building program.  This concept worked for me during the first 60 days… by day 61, I was actually getting very frustrated as I had not lost more than 5 pounds.  Now I know I had gained serious muscle.  My legs felt the best they ever have – even when I played basketball.  However, my brain has a way of creeping in and creating self doubt and disappointment.  I had ONLY lost 5 lbs – and I’d been doing this craziness for 60 days??  That was too sad for me.  By this time in the Body for Life program, I had lost 15 lbs.  I was starting to feel really burned out on the program.  Rick had lost about 13 lbs by this time.

Now, I know all about muscle weighing more than fat and you can’t judge your progress by the scale – take measurements, yadda yadda.   Actually I had been and I knew I lost inches.  But I still had not lost a pants size and that was frustrating.  Too frustrating for me.  I started feeling like I needed more cardio in the daily routines.

I went off to start researching cardio routines and almost bought the Biggest Loser’s set.  But then I went back to Beachbody to review their workouts and saw that they had just recently released a new program – INSANITY. I watched the video and was immediately impressed.  THIS was what I was looking for.  A serious cardio workout.

Now, Rick and I are not in the best workout shape.  We realize this.  In fact, when we started P90X, we had to skip about 30 minutes of the 90 minute yoga CD because we just couldn’t do it.  By the end of the first 60 days, we were completing all the CDs and were pretty decent.  We could stay with the workouts for the most part.  We do have to modify some of the exercises because our bodies just can’t do them – like the guitar player jump.  That one is just not happening with my body.  But overall, we were able to do the exercises and keep going even if at a slower clip than the video.  I could even get through the entire Yoga CD – which incidentally is one of the hardest CDs to do if not the hardest – yoga is tough.

Anyway, I figured we’d apply the same philosophy to INSANITY – go as strong as we could and modify as needed.  I realized that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the intensity level of the people on the CD at first – maybe never.  But if we could do the exercises with some modification the program would work for me.

We took a week off in between P90X and INSANITY – which really helped my body recover however it makes that first week getting back in the workout groove all that much harder.

So last Tuesday was our first day of INSANITY.  The first day, you take a fit test and record your results.  There are 7-8 exercises (can’t remember exact count) and you record how many reps you can do in a minute.  With this program, you take the fit test every two weeks – which I really like – to track progress.

Remarkably we were able to do the exercises (just not at the same intensity level as the people on the CD but still at a high level of intensity for each of us).  By Thursday, my calves were hurting. I mean screaming!  Not sure why they didn’t hurt like that during P90X but they were tightening up and making it difficult to walk.  So we rested Fri, Sat and Sun and gave my calves and Rick’s thighs a chance to recover.  My calves were back on track yesterday so we continued with the program.

Thus far it’s been exactly what I had hoped for.  Real cardio – intense cardio exercises – but ones that we do at our own pace.  We do push ourselves and feel the burn for sure.  But we are definitely not in the shape those people are in.  I also don’t think we could even have started INTENSITY had we not done P90X first.  This is an intense program for sure.

I’ve been impressed with the program and myself. Shaun T is definitely different than Tony Horton.  Each has their own ways of motivating and their own styles.  I like them both.  I’m definitely excited about INSANITY.  And it’s sure good to be working out again after a week off.  I think we had developed a dare I say it – a habit – and when it wasn’t there it was really strange for us.

At any rate, I hope to drop 15 pounds over the next 60 days.  After that we’ll go back and do P90X again and then maybe a combo of both.  We are trying to come up with a life routine where we eat better and exercise regularly. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.

If you’ve never heard of these programs before watch the video clips below and check them out.

Here is an intro video to P90X

And here is an intro video for INSANITY

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On Thursday Rogue (our black lab) went off to be spayed.  For a regular dog, this can be a traumatic experience.  That seems predictable and normal. But for Rogue…

We got Rogue when she was 8 weeks old.  Since that time, she has been ingrained so much with the family that that animal can NOT be by herself for one minute without whining.  It used to drive me crazy but I have gotten used to it in the last year.  We used to be able to let out Bandit (our first black lab) and he’d go lay outside for awhile and enjoy the sun/shade and just being outside – without barking and causing a scene.  NOT ROGUE.

Rogue goes out and does her business and then immediately makes a beeline right back to the door.  And there she sits and begins her whining campaign to come in the house.  If we are outside she is fine.  But God forbid she is outside by herself for any period of time and the whining and crying begins.  I will say that because I had a hard time dealing with this quirk of hers initially (read that as a lot of yelling out the window to stop whining), she has been forced to develop a more patient “sit and wait a little bit” stance before the full onslaught of whines begin.  I think she can make it to 5 minutes before I hear a bark to be let in.  So I’ve just adjusted and she has adjusted.  In the morning, I will either wait for her to be done or walk away and start my coffee and come back and let her in right away.

Now, take this mindset into being away from us for a day and a half….  When I picked up Rogue at the vet yesterday, the lady at the front desk told me that Rogue was quite vocal on Thursday after her surgery.   Now I read “quite vocal” as the polite way of saying “she was annoying as all hell and would NOT shut up and drove us crazy all day long”… but for obvious reasons she wasn’t going to say exactly that to me.  They had told Rick when he dropped her off that she would sleep all day after the surgery. Riiiight.  He told them that he thought we might have to come and get her early because she has major separation anxiety.  Suffice it to say we were right and she whined and barked all day – no sleeping and no resting.

Last night the kids stayed with Grandma for a sleepover.  We thought this would give Rogue another 16 hours or so of not being pestered by the kids – maybe she’d even sleep.  HA!  While she was thrilled to see us, she really wanted to see the kids.  Throughout the night she woke us up several times with her whining.  At 2am, Rick thought she might just be in a lot of pain and we gave her another pain pill.  She settled for a bit but in another hour or so she was back at it.  So Rick got up and went in the back room and laid down with her.  Yes… laid down with the dog.  LOL!  She did settle down and I didn’t hear her again until 8am or so (we get to sleep in when sleepovers happen).  Rick said that she was fine as long as she had physical contact laying next to him.

This morning the kids have returned and Rogue has been estatic.  By the way she is acting you would never think she was spayed two days ago.  We are going to have such a hard time keeping her calm for the next two weeks.

She does seem very relieved though.  Enough to be calm for a brief period… this is what is happening as I type this

She seems content – enough to maybe get a bit of rest today.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

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