PSA: Our Costa Rica yoga retreat is happening in November! I'd love for you to join us! And, we're down to our last few YBC Holiday Mantra Boxes - our awesome discovery box - so order now if you'd like one! Lastly, if you have the YBC App and take a min to review it, send a screenshot of your review to Lauren and we'll send you a little something in thanks.
Pin now, practice later - pre-run yoga poses.
While I love lifting heavy, I've recently started bumping up my cardio because I'd like to lean out a bit before the photoshoot for my book in December. Sprint interval training has always been a love/hate relationship for me - actually a lot like Bikram yoga. While I'm doing it I'm miserable but then afterwards I feel like I can conquer the world and am drawn to keep doing it.
If you've ever stopped your cardio workouts and then started back up again, you know how challenging that is. The lungs are burning, and you're sweating yet cold at the same time and it's all around an unpleasant experience (and that's putting it mildly). But when Polar sent me this heart rate monitor, it was the little push I needed to keep going.
I'm not really a numbers person. I don't count calories or weigh myself or anything like that, but I found myself really drawn to checking out what my heart rate was throughout my sprints, and I loved that at the end, the heart rate monitor gives you a full run down of how long you were in each zone. I actually found myself wanting to wear the heart rate monitor for workouts as well just to see how hard I was truly working during my lift sessions (turns out, pretty hard! Yeah!).
I've been trying to incorporate 20 - 30 minutes of sprints three or four times per week. I usually do this on the treadmill with the speed set to 10.5 or 11 and the incline set to 7 - 9 (I switch them up during my rests). So I'll sprint for ten seconds, then rest for twenty. Then I'll sprint for fifteen seconds, and rest for thirty. After five sprints I'll jog for three to five minutes and then start the sprints again and continue that pattern for twenty to thirty minutes. After spraining my ankle back in April, this has really been the first time I've run since then so I feel really happy about that especially because my ankle is doing just fine with it!
Do any of you use a heart rate monitor? Do you enjoy seeing the numbers? Are you a numbers person? If you're a sprinter - what's the method to your maddness?
This post is sponsored by FitFluential on behalf of Polar.
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