Back to Boot Camp

Now that the daylight hours are shortening it's time to head back to the gym for boot camp class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.  About six months ago, the gym had an instructor change for the class and I heard mixed reviews.  I had stopped going so that I could ride bikes in the evenings...but work got in the way of that plan more than I would have liked.

Last week I was all set for the return to boot camp.  One of my friends was traveling on vacation so I messaged one of the other regulars for class.  She was also away on vacation but she let me know that there weren't classes for the week since it was the fall break between sessions.  Lucky me I got to delay the pain of boot camp for one more week.

Tuesday night I headed to the gym after work and headed into the locker room to get changed.  I had some new Nike running capris to break in and paired them with a loose fit Under Armor workout shirt.  Both super comfy for a mixed workout.  I headed upstairs to the workout room and joined the waiting queue in the hallway.  There were a lot less people waiting than in the past with the original instructor.  It used to be a full house with people turned away from class.

We filed into the class room and discovered there was another new instructor.  Tonya was the new instructor and this was everyone's first time to experience one of her workouts.  She set the stations up in a circle and it was a little tighter than we were used to.  Normally the stations cover the entire large room and we were maybe using about half of it.  The stations were done in partners and involved a mix of weights and cardio.  Most of the cardio were plyometric things like split squats and rowing on the Shockwave rowers.  We did each station for one minute and sadly only made it through the entire circuit once before moving onto some drills with a 45lb weight plate.  We pushed that weight up and down a circuit and alternated with a few modifications for each rep.  The finish to the workout was much tougher than the circuits.

Most of the boot camp regulars were a little disappointed in the workout since it was more beginner level than the advanced level that all were used to.  Well, fast forward to tonight and Tonya stepped it up a notch! Tonight's class was 10 times harder! The workout she laid out tonight was all done at your individual pace.  It included 5 weight stations and 5 cardio stations.  Each person alternated between the circuit doing a cardio rep then a weight rep.  The weight stations were done to a count of 20 reps while the cardio stations were done for distance.  Some examples that we did were power skips, high knees, and grapevine for cardio and push ups, dead lifts, tricep dips for weights.  The weight stations felt heavy on the legs to me so I'm sure I'll be feeling soreness in the next day or two.

It feels good to be headed back to the gym and I look forward to getting back into my boot camp routine.