Glad to hear that - I gave you the same advice as Midwife on the chat thread.

Well, I did the workout, and boy was it a killer! I was wrong, there weren't TWO sets of 15-20 squats, there were FOUR sets! I didn't use any weight for the squats and only used light weight for my first two sets of step-ups, then no weight for the last two. NRLW wasn't kidding when they called Stage 7 "The Final Cut" . . . I think my HR was about 165 the entire time, which is pretty impressive considering it wasn't a cardio workout. I thought I was going to pass out afterwards!

Yay Jessica!! You're a woman now!!

Bumping this thread up - c'mon everyone, keep it up!

I'm not making much progress on the scale towards my Valentine's day goal, despite 95% POP eating and lots of hard workouts. I was POP last week, got to the gym 6 days for some tough workouts. I'm also training again for a benchpress/deadlift competition, and have been increasing weights, so I'm probably building muscle (not the best to try to build muscle and drop fat at the same time, I know but...). I did take my measurements Saturday, I need to start better tracking them as well as my scale weight.

By Friday I was totally PMS-ing and starting to bloat, worse than usual, but I was trying not to let that get me off track. I had sushi night w/ the girls Saturday and besides eating too much I definitely had tons of sodium, I always swell up after sushi b/c I love soy sauce too much! BF cooked Sun. night, which he doesn't often do (this after some comments by me that he should cook more often b/c I always do the cooking ), and he picked pasta, the one meal in his repertoire that isn't as healthy. I didn't want to criticize his choice after I cajoled him into cooking, and I like pasta, but definitely overate. Other than the two meals I mentioned I have been POP, though, so I just need to shed some water weight and hopefully I will decrease a bit on the scale this week.

Jessica, AWESOME job doing the workout despite being sore!!! I remember the jumping lunges in NRLW are what killed me - I always had to pause a few times to finish them, but gosh my legs got strong! What's in store for this week?

Midwife, Allison, how are the colds this week?

Kitty, Pat, Ward, how's it going?

My scale is headed in the wrong direction too. :P I blame TOM and sodium. I have my physical scheduled for next week and I'm hoping for a better weigh-in than last year. I think I'm about 5lbs less than I was then, and more of it is muscle, so hopefully their magic scale that tells you your weight, BF%, and RMR will be nicer to me.

Megan, I'm getting close to the end of NRLW! This week is stage 7 workouts 3 and 4, then I just have one more week to go. I need to get cracking on coming up with something to do after I'm done. I keep thinking about posting on the weight lifting forum for advice, but I never get more than one or two responses when I post there so maybe I should just do it here instead? And I sucked at the jumping lunges and squat jumps! Confession time -- of all the times I was supposed to do 2 sets of the body weight matrix, I only actually did 2 sets ONCE. I was about ready to die after one set!

Hey guys. My scale is not moving down. I need to be super clean and have consistantly fewer calories than what I am currently eating to get where I want to go. But I'm not terribly upset about where I am at either. Maintenance.

exercise good.
mood bad.
pms, tom, both gone. just stress of life.

the wind broke my power ranger umbrella

So good this weekend, but alas the scale is not doing anything. I skipped workouts last week due to my cold, but I'm back at it today, well, I was back at it Saturday and again today. Hopefully that will help things out a bit. Best part is that I have no trace of the cold left.

Condolences, kittycat, on the loss of your umbrella!

Hello, all. Thanks for bumping, Megan.

I am feeling pretty good. The number is dropping and today I bought a wool crepe jacket in a charity shop for £6.99 (say, $US 11). Pale turquoise blue. Orvis, size 6. OK, vanity sizing but still!

Formal exercise needs more time which is not available as the work-care planets are currently configured. It'll come, though.

Keep at it, everyone.

P.S. More Super Powers on their way to you, KC.

Jessica - come and join us on the WL chat thread. Shannon has lots of good routines and I'm happy to share mine from my PN program...

Busy, busy, busy here. DH leaves tonight for a 2 week hiking/sailing vacation in Hawaii. I get a vacation in a home-alone sort of way. Trade in not cooking for someone else, less laundry, and owning the remote for cleaning the catbox, emptying the trash and such like.

Morning all. Victory of the day: I went in early this morning for benchpress training w/ trainer Tim and co-trainee Cathy. Tim always keeps track of our exercises and how much we're lifting, not us. C & I just do what he tells us. After warming up he puts 80# on the bar (er, with the bar it all equals 80#) and tells me to do 3 sets of 8 reps. Oof, it feels SO HARD this morning. I had to go down to 75# for the last set. Then Tim tells me last week I only did 3 sets of 75#, so I actually went up in weight (and I thought I was just having an 'off' day - actually increased so not off at all). Yay!

This is my one and only early AM workout of the week, also a "yay". Dress rehearsals start later in the evening Wed & Thurs so I'll go to the gym between work & rehearsal.

Pat, BF was just gone for 3 weeks and it's definitely nice in some ways! You miss them, but then you get to watch what you want (I Netflix-ed a bunch of chick flicks he won't go near), no snoring, went out more w/ my girlfriends, etc. I tried to focus on those positives so I wouldn't miss him too much.

Silver, in addition to being a nice size the jacket sounds lovely. Great find!

Kitty, so sorry about the umbrella.

Jessica, I know, I didn't know what to do after I was done NRLW either. I did start getting Oxygen magazine and pulled a lot of routines from there, and read over all of the stickies in the weightlifting forum. Right now I'm considering getting The Female Body Breakthrough by Rachel Cosgrove. She seems to be in a similar train of thought as Cassandra Forsythe. But I think I'd need to wait until I'm done training for the benchpress/deadlift competition (April) to start it.

Keep up the hard work all!!!

Scale is starting to recover, despite TOM coming later this week (my favorite thing about hormonal birth control is that I know *exactly* when TOM will be! ). I have two cheat meals this weekend though so I need to be careful -- one that I had planned, a nice dinner before the symphony with DH, but then it turns out FIL's birthday is this weekend so we have to have dinner with them the day before. I will try to eat healthy there but I know I'll have cake.

Megan, great job with the weights!

Picking out a new strength regimen is tricky. I'm going to be ramping up triathlon training soon so I need to tone down the strength. I want a routine that will maintain what I have without making me too sore to run and bike. Then next winter, after triathlon season, I can go back to more strength work.

Jessica, I just googled "strength training for triathletes" and a few interesting websites popped up... occurred to me that there probably is a lot of info on there on how to strength train to support your triathlon training, instead of not being sure if what you're doing is helping or hurting your goals.

http://www.trifuel.com/triathlon/str...tes-000577.php
http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/cm...?articleid=425
http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com...-training.html

There were a bunch more... maybe helpful?

I dropped 3 lbs of water weight last night to get back to 154, my pre-Christmas weight. That was a 5-lb water weight gain due to TOM and soy sauce-related sodium. I know I say it every month, but I really shouldn't weigh at all when I start to feel the TOM bloat creep on. It just makes me crazy, every single month, even though I know what's causing it! Next month I'll really try to stay off the scale.

Today is elliptical day and legs day, heavy. I love legs day!

How is everyone else doing?

WTG Megan! Wish I could say the same....Oh, well, it's not for lack of trying. I just need to cut back more. But it's really hard for me when it's cold. I want comfort food when it's cold. I just can't see eating a cold salad when I'm already freezing! It's like "bring on the cheese!" Ugh.

This is a hard time of year to have salads for me as well. I make veggie soup that is much more palatable and comparable in calories I'd say, unless you go crazy with what you put in it. Much more soothing.