The 30 Day Shred: Getting Shreddy With It

It’s been exactly a month since I posted that I was starting the 30 Day Shred program. As with all exercise programs, I did really well at the beginning.

Check out my little progress chart where I kept track of when I exercised and which program I did for the day. I kicked some major Shred butt at first. I mean, the day I started I had a full-on asthma attack and had to sneak (gasping) into my son’s room to borrow his inhaler… but that didn’t stop me!

My slope into a downfall began when I started the third workout program. Yes, the beginning days of Shred #1 and Shred #2 were hard. But the beginning days of Shred #3 were pretty much impossible for me.

Once I moved on to the third workout, my knees started really hurting and I’m not really a fragile knee kind of girl. I tried to get over it and took a little break after each workout, but there were just some exercises that I just could not do.

Specifically one where you start standing up and somehow throw yourself onto the floor, do a weird ab crunch and then catapult yourself back up into a standing position.

Um… no.

When I attempted the same move I ended up doing this pathetic old lady move where I slowly lowered myself to the ground while clutching our coffee table ottoman for dear life. Once I reached the floor I’d splay my body out to do an awesome crunch and then roll to my knees and end up falling over when trying to stand back up.

So sexy. And such an effective exercise.

After the first couple tries at Shred #3, I decided to substitute some of the moves from previous exercises so that I wasn’t just stopping and staring at the TV with my hands on my hips. That kind of worked, but I still felt like I was kind of half-assing my workout.

So I decided to give up on Shred #3 and return to Shred #1 and just increase the weight of my hand weights. This change worked out wonderfully, until my kid decided to sabotage my exercise plan.

After months of going straight to sleep when I lay him down at 8:00, Jack suddenly decided that it would be more fun to fight me on bedtime. After battling him for an hour or so, I no longer had the energy to workout and would pretty much climb in bed at 9:00 fully defeated.

So I fell off the wagon and haven’t hopped back on yet.

The good news is that I really like the 30 Day Shred and I feel like it was an effective and convenient exercise program for me to follow. Through a combination of the Shred workout and keeping my diet in check (I use an app called MyFitnessPal to keep track of my caloric intake) I lost 5 pounds and have kept it off for a couple weeks now. Well, sometimes the scale says I only lost 4 pounds but I think it’s just jealous.

I’m planning to get back in the groove on Friday and start again with Shred workout #1 and my heavier weights again. Actually, I’m doing The Color Run on Saturday morning, so it’s possible I might not start Shredding again until Sunday night.

It might take a couple more days to start, but I can assure you that I WILL start again. I figure if I can just rotate between the first two Shred workouts I’ll be a happy camper. And hopefully lose some more weight too.

Of course I’ll keep you posted on my progress but no promises on whether anyone EVER sees my before pictures!

How about you – have you done an exercise program where the instructor did something crazy and you just sat there and yelled at the TV?

One time I took a Step class that was so hard that I just started shaking my butt and flailing my arms randomly halfway through… only to be caught when the entire class did some fancy move where they were all suddenly facing the back of the class.

Tell me your stories in the comments!