Getting Back Into The Groove

Although I stretch out at pilates and in the hotel room, getting back to the groove of cardio and HIIT (after not doing those for a few weeks) is a little tough. Doing only stretches in the exercise routine and getting too comfortable with it tend to make me grimace at the idea of hard cardio and getting the heart rate up in sweat classes. That’s a lot of jumping required. My quads aren’t hot about jumping.

After the first two consecutive HIIT + weights classes, the sore muscles set in. There’s something almost pleasurable about being pushed to my limits in GRIT Plyo and GRIT Strength classes. I didn’t cut myself any slack on the reps or ‘ease in’ by using lighter weights. After a while, my mind pushes past the pain barrier, the lungs take deeper breaths, and I simply do those jumps and lifts to the end. Each class only takes 30 minutes. It’s not an insurmountable feat to get through them. (I tell myself this every other day.) The daily classes are fairly fun, and they force me to just get with it. NO IFs, NO BUTs.

But these aches aren’t the kind that make me wince in pain when I remove the sports bra. Yup, it’s a thing. Do arms-and-shoulders day and tell me how you feel. These are the awesome aches that creep in when I stretch out before bedtime, and they disappear in the morning when I roll out of bed. (Not the weird debilitating ones like those from kettlebell swings which rendered me unable to even do roll-ups or roll-downs.) It made me wonder if I ever did HIIT or any sort of exercise in the first place before the trip to Japan. It felt as though burpees killed me all over again. Ahh, muscles, you're funny things.