Cathe Legs & Glutes

[Guest guest]

I got this one done this morning before I had to pick up the little camper and I loved it! I never thought I'd say a lower body workout was fun, but this one really was! For some reason, i equate lower body workouts with torture. I realized that just recently and it obviously means they are really hard work for me and I need to do more. Core workouts are in this category too but they got easier as I started doing more so I'm expecting the same will be true with lower body. I can easily see and feel my upper body getting stronger and more defined but it seems to take so much more work to do the same with the lower body and so I just avoid looking at it as much or working it as hard. Enough of that. I started getting more interested in this last week, now I'm definitely on board and Legs & Glutes was a fun way to get myself going.

Fun does NOT equal easy though! I almost never do just lower body for 50+ minutes but she had great music and Cathe seemed to be having a good time too so it went really fast. Cathe also seemed to be working really hard too! She often does but I was especially impressed with her in this one. She was much more "welcoming" towards less advanced people than she was with Cardio Kicks too, with lots of words of encouragement aimed at taking breaks if needed, using less or no weight, etc. I pretended I didn't hear any of it, although I did appreciate hearing I wouldn't be a failure if I had to. I liked the variety of exercises in this one too and it all seemed to flow really well, even the transitions to explosive plie squats and explosive lunges (wow!) and later, to the floor seemed natural. Cathe did this mostly with 12s and 15s, I used 8s and those were plenty challenging. They didn't seem so at first but after she added in pulses and more and more reps, they seemed awfully heavy and it was a struggle to pull out te last reps with good form. She did the floorwork with 2# ankle weights and I grabbed my lighter pair, which turned out to be 1 lb each. I have 2 pairs and I think 1 is heavier, I have to actually weigh both to know for sure! I had no idea what poundage I was using while I was doing the workout but I knew they were REALLY heavy by the end of each set of exercises! Cathe said the exercises would be as effective without ankle weights and I have no doubt they would be but I was really excited to get through it all with mine still on!

The only thing I both loved and was getting annoyed by was the music. It was excellent and I really liked having the singing as part of it (and so thankful Cathe didn't sing along, a la Tamilee) but it was so loud sometimes I couldn't hear Cathe as well as I would have liked. Very minor issue though.

I've got really sore arms from the previous 2 workouts and have Aerobox down for tomorrow and Get Extremely Ripped on for Friday. I might rethink one of those but we'll see.