Workout update plus a !free! bonus from Workout Muse (nope, it's not steak knives)

Yesterday I attended a 2-hour TRX workshop for personal trainers. It wasn't a workout per se, but we did a lot of learn-by-doing so a fair amount of physical activity happened. It was an incredible Indian summer day in San Francisco, so we took the TRX units out to a park, hooked 'em up to a jungle gym, and did the workshop there. It was lots of fun although we got some very strange looks . I plan to practice with it intensively this week, then start using it with clients as soon as I feel I have a good understanding of how to make the exercises safe and effective for people at all different fitness levels. I think it's going to be a tremendous tool for helping a few of my clients transition from wall squats with a stability ball to free squats, and also for helping my more advanced people achieve greater range of motion on their one-leg squats.

So, anyway, today I did the 25 minute "Total Body Express" workout that came with my TRX unit, and then I followed up with a 20 minute kettlebell circuit workout. The circuit consisted of overhead squats, presses, 1-leg Romanian deadlifts, cleans, and swings, each exercise performed for 50 seconds, with a 10 second rest between exercises. So, four times through the circuit.

And that brings me to the !free! bonus from Workout Muse. It's called "The Holiday Survival Kit," and it consists of an mp3 track that'll cue you through the 50/10 intervals, and an e-book with suggestions for what exercises to do. The idea is to pick 5 exercises: a 2-leg exercise, a push, a 1-leg exercise, a pull, and a core move, do each for 50 seconds with a 10 second rest between exercises, repeated 4 times. The downloadable e-book has a bodyweight-only routine, a kettlebell routine, a couple of band routines, and a couple of dumbbell routines. I didn't care for the kettlebell routine in the e-book so I put together my own, but the basic template is just fine--I love me some peripheral heart activity training!--and I did adhere to that.

If you check out my linked blogs you should be able to get to the latest posting from Workout Muse that talks about the Holiday Survival Kit. I don't know that it's something I'd pay money for, unless of course it came with the world's smallest juicer and a spiral slicer for carving decorative vegetables, but it's a worthwhile freebie if you'd rather listen to an mp3 than watch the clock.