Over the years I have had people tell me that they do not like weight lifting because they think they only burn calories and get a good workout doing cardio. I had to tell them in a nice way that they were wrong. Way wrong! I used to think this way too though.
For my first time in a weight room, I took a couple sheets of paper with me that detailed an upper body circuit. I really did not know what I was doing but each exercise had pictures of a woman doing them so that helped. The good thing was that no one was there to stare at me with a judging look.
The circuit had me doing ten different upper body exercises back to back without stopping plus one minute of cardio. Let me tell you that this was killer! I was just coming off of being a cardio and DVD queen so this seemed like quite a change comparatively speaking. I was using weights heavier than the ones I had at home that went along with the DVDs and this made the cardio I chose to do (walking at a steep incline on the treadmill) at the end of the circuit even harder than it is if it were the only workout I was doing.
I forgot how many calories it said I burned on my heart monitor watch but I remember being very surprised. I was of the thought that a workout had to be really long in order for it to be effective. This is not true because that 25 minute workout was killer! I found a lower body circuit to do during the week as well. For the cardio on that one, I did jump squats with five pound dumbbells. If you have not tried weighted jump squats yet, you really should.
So all in all, this is another type of workout I would highly recommend. I still do my upper body weight lifting as a circuit because I like it so much. It is a short workout but it is a quality workout which is really important.
As always, make your workout work for you!
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