Switching Gears

It's been nearly 3 years since I've posted. In those years, I've gained a daughter, some random knowledge, and a whole new love: fitness. I've been wanting to post for a long time, but with a blog that's pretty much following an 'exclusively hunting' theme you kind of run out of things to say. Not to say that I don't love hunting nor that I don't plan on posting about hunting anymore, it's just hard to post about the it all the time without sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, especially if I'm not going to exciting new places anytime soon. Anyway, after much thought, I've decided to blog about my journey into fitness.  Now some background; in 2015, Brandon and I started visiting a local gym. I quickly learned just how out of shape I and how badly I wanted to get in shape. But then, in the summer of 2015, we decided we wanted another baby. So naturally gym time slowed down due to morning (all day) sickness, swollen feet, a sore back, and a rowdy toddler. Finding a gym with a babysitter was a feat in its own, so gym time came to a complete halt. In July 2016, we welcome our little Elizabeth Claire into the world. Now this may be in my head, or it may be a true physiological reason, but I really feel like the nearly one year we spent in the gym prior to becoming pregnant helped my labor, birth and recovery 10 times more than when I had Noah. Maybe it was the squats, maybe it was the deads, I don't know what it was, but there was a huge difference; and it really has influenced me to want to get in the best shape possible.  After Claire was born, we had to wait 6 months before we could take her to the gym daycare (thank goodness for the YMCA!) so I really didn't do much diet wise before we started. This theme continued all the way through the year 2017. All gym, no diet. Therefore, I'm only 8 pounds down from where I was in January 2017. So I will be the first to admit that 2017 was a learning year. I learned a lot, and I did make gains- considering I was pretty much on a "bulk" all year (insert eye roll emoji here). On my next blog post I'll post all my current stats, I don't want to overload everyone with information here. I will say that I did drop 2 pants sizes and have maintained that, but there's still a lot of cutting that needs to be done.  Now here's what we did gym wise in 2017. Normally warm up with cardio; jogging, stationary bike, elliptical, pretty much whatever was open and  whatever I felt like doing. There were plenty of times that I went and did no cardio at all. Most days, we followed a crossfit type routine. My husband prefers just straight powerlifting, but I always felt like I needed to do more than that to burn the fat like I wanted. The YMCA in our location does a "Beast Mode" class. The first class I ever did consisted of an obscene amount of thrusters and burpees and I completely fell in love. The instructors were ( and still are) straight up amazing. They would leave the daily class up so we could do them in the evenings. There were plenty of weeks that I would do these classes 4 & 5 times. I did see results. My lifts increased, my cardio became bullet proof, and you could definitely see definition (especially in my upper body) that wasn't there before. But the scale never moved. My clothes fit the same for months. Now that was discouraging. By the end of the end of the year, I had to take a 6 week hiatus. My husband played softball which took up one, sometimes two weeknights, and my son played T-ball which also took up two weeknights. After that came the holidays, so essentially I went to the gym maybe once a week until the beginning of January.  My lifts dropped dramatically. Cardio game was weak.  It's time to crack down.
So January first came, and instead of the traditional "lose 25lbs" resolution, I decided to make legitimate goals that I want to hit this year.

• Do a 5k- The swamp rabbit 5K is coming May 4th, so I've been working on my cardio game.
• Bench- 135lbs.
• Deadlift- 285lbs
• Squat- 215
• Clean & Jerk (Power or hang)- 135lb

Now I may come up with other goals as the year goes on, but for now this is where I'm at. The month of January was the first time that I really tried cracking down. The results were not what I expected, but I'll touch on that on my next blog. I think I've given yall enough info for tonight, and I've got a flu positive almost 5 year old in the other room, so the bed is calling my name. 

Also, if yall haven't gotten the hint yet, by switching gears, I'm going to start emphasizing fitness on this blog. I don't and never will claim to be an expert, but I want to share with yall my story. No one else, nothing fancy, just a chubby girl who wants to make gains and get fit. So I'm super excited that I get to share this journey from the very beginning with yall!