Cardio -- Day 1

I seriously hate cardio but to increase my metabolism and to breakthrough, I have no choice but to improve my cardiovascular system. And so, today was my first time actually hitting the gym and do my cardio.

Before I started my actual cardio session, I did 3 sets of parallel-grip chin-ups (body only) as my lats are really lacking. Just touching up a little: 7, 7, 9.

Now, the main event of the day. I kicked off by warming up on the elliptical trainer for 10 minutes. No worries, only at L6.

I continued with 5 sets of 60 seconds intervals at 14.0 on the treadmill. Man, that sucked the breath outta me. I then worked 15 minutes on the rowing machine. Up till that point, I've burnt approximately 350 kcal of calories.

I wanted to move on to kettlebells, but the circuit gym was closed for a class, so I head on to the Olympic gym and started swinging the barbell with power cleans for 5 sets of 12. I didn't go heavy as I'm still pretty new to this exercise and I focused more on high repetitions to perfect my technique.

And since power cleans involve a little bit of the delts, I figured I should just head on and do some military presses to fully exhaust my delts. Just 2 sets of 40kg (88lbs) with 11 and 9. I also did 3 sets side lateral raise with 10kg (22lbs) and 2 sets of standing reverse flyes with 6kg (13lbs). Yeap, light weight. Just touching up, like I said.

And then when I was about to move on to abs, I realized that I could just use the Romanian balls as a kettlebell! And so I picked the 10kg (22lbs) ball and did 5 sets of 15.

Last but not least, my abs. As usual, 3 sets of tri-sets, comprising of crunches, raised-legged crunches and leg raises: 20+20+20, 25+25+25 and 30+30+30. That makes if a total of 225 reps on my abs and that concludes my workout for the day, using 65 minutes in the gym.