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So how is everyone sleeping?? Happy to hear so many of you are up for a sleep challenge! So here’s how it’s going to work: make a concerted effort to get 7-9 hours of sleep a night (or, really, whatever works for you, this is a general number), keep track of your hours, then I’ll ask for the hours on Monday. I’ll then take all the comments from those who participated and draw a random winner and some them something fun! So you’re not reeeeally winning based on total hours of sleep, I just want to know you tried!

I also want to add how thoroughly impressed I am that so many of my readers already get close to 8 hours of sleep a night. I used to be one of those people who could sleep 10 hours a night no problem (actually, I did for a month the semester my professors went on strike…) Somewhere along the way it became a lot more difficult to sleep in, especially past that 7am mark. Ugh.

I unplugged by 9:30 last night and had my lights out by 9:50. I then woke up naturally at 5:25am – five minutes before my alarm! This morning I did some upper-body weight lifting and cardio intervals at the gym. Usually, my upper-body day is a heavy weight day, but today I went down in weights to focus on my form.

Started with elliptical sprint intervals for my warm-up. I’ve been playing around with recovery time, and have a routine now that’s a booty-kicker.

Back

Chest

Shoulders

Biceps – Alternating Sets

Triceps – Alternating Sets

Finished off with 10 minutes on the stepmill and a 90 second plank. My personal training coach is an anti-crunch person much like myself. I’ve always been of the belief that you stabilize yourself with your abs in all your weight lifting moves, so hurting your back by doing a gazillion crunches isn’t really helping the cause. But I do think it’s important to have a strong core, and a little plank work never hurts ;)

Also, I have to add that I was analyzing the form of those around me in the weight area (no one at my gym is safe now!). Surprisingly, the people in the free-weight area were near-perfect, but there were some serious offenders on the cable machines! Oh gosh. It’s actually scary to see how people move with the cable pulleys and have no control over the movement. One guy was definitely hurting his shoulder doing tricep pushdowns, which shouldn’t be the case at all.

Okay, okay, rambling over. Photos!

I remembered my iced coffee this morning. Bonus.

Cottage cheese, yogurt, protein powder, maple extract, cinnamon, frozen berries, cashew butter, Grape Nuts. Got that?

It’s my favourite breakfast these days :)

Cherry dark chocolate protein bars are on the outs.

I have a fun new batch setting in the fridge as I type. Think marshmallow squares ;)

Gigantor salad for lunch.

Same mix as last night! Except with my fave new dressing – watered down hummus.

And I maaay have picked up a little treat so I can have lunch desserts at the office.

I ate two, gotta get the most out of that bag!

They’re no Mini Eggs, but still okay. What is it about Mini Eggs that makes them so magical??

Afternoon snack was something different:

Mini bagels! Two of them are only 160 calories, and I stuffed a little Yves veggie ham in there for a protein boost.

For some reason I was super excited to make this for dinner tonight:

 
Smoked salmon omelette. Maple smoked salmon to be exact. Ohman, I can’t make any of the local sugar bush events this year :( I lovelovelove anything maple!

Speaking of my insatiable sweet tooth, more chocolate followed dinner.

President’s Choice European Dark. It’s okay. I’m a Lindt girl.

Oh! And before I forget, Janetha asked me if I have a workout schedule. The answer to that is no, but I do tend to do the same things. This is what it generally looks like:

Monday: 60 minute spin class
Tuesday: Heavy upper-body weight lifting with HIIT
Wednesday: 50-60 minutes running
Thursday: Rest day or cardio machines (not treadmill)
Friday: Full-body lifting, medium weights
Saturday: Cardio class (like step) or cardio machines (if I miss a class)
Sunday: rest day

Really, the only things that typically stay the same are Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, and sometimes I’ll swap out a DVD on Fridays if I’m out late the night before. I try to balance it out so my arms and legs get to rest a little in-between workouts. While I only have two lifting workouts, my cardio machine and cardio class days always involve a little resistance training. However, it seems what with travel and life, I can’t seem to stick to just one schedule! I’m notorious for changing up proper training schedules. Actually, I don’t think I even followed one for my triathlon :\ Meh, I like to fly by the seat of my pants ;)

Question of the Day: Do you follow a workout schedule or take it day by day? My schedule gets a little more complicated in the summer when I try to coincide my outdoor runs and biking with the unreliable weather. Maybe I’ll try running in the rain this summer. Maybe. :P