Friday's Class: Circuit 6:15am to 7am

Fridays give me some workout options because the Y offers two classes in the morning that I can finish without going into cardiac arrest and still get to work on time: a Muscle class and a Circuit class. Neither of these classes are running intense, so they are perfect for doubling up on. Also, I will sometimes skip my morning classes on Friday and go in the evening. This works because I don't take any weekend class, which means I can give myself the proper amount of rest by going later in the day on Saturday if I worked out late on Friday. Other times I will just use Friday as a rest day if the classes earlier in the week have wiped me out, or I have gone too many days in a row.

Friday's Muscle class begins at 5:30am and ends 6:15am and is followed by A Circuit training class that ends at 7am. This is the only day of the week that I can double up on classes, because of times or the classes just don’t work well together. Of these two offerings I prefer the Circuit Training class, which is the more challenging class and offers the most variety. In all honesty, I am not a fan of either Muscle classes offered at my Y because they are both like a traditional aerobics class and are almost identical from one week to the next.

This week I have had issues with getting to bed on time, so I only went to the later class this week, which is the one that I enjoy more anyway. The Circuit class is set up in stations. There will be two exercises at each station, and you will spend 4 minutes at each station switching back and forth between each exercise after each minute. You go at you own pace and you are the only person in the room doing that exercise at that moment. After completing 4 minutes, you move to the next station. The instructor will often stop us between stations and have the whole class do the same exercise for 30 seconds.

I enjoy this class because our instructor is very good at monitoring our form, and she rotates different exercises in and out of the class from week to week, but there are a core group of exercises that you are sure to see each week. (there is no escaping burpees !!! p.s. the shit with the rings on the end of this video is just sick in the head. Not in this lifetime for me!!) Another aspect of this class that I really like is that each person does what they can in one minute, so nobody falls behind, and it is impossible for the Type A personality people to push the pace of the class into a death march or worse turn the class into something that resembles this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Ghf9HlhKo
The circuit class offers the group atmosphere but makes the competition a personal one.

Today's class:

burpees
calf raises
full ab raise
down dog push ups
jumping jacks
star fish
oblique mt. climbers
plank
squats on a bosu
jump the line
modified planks
shoulder press w/10 lbs weights

and two more exercises that I have blocked out forgotten.
we also did 30 sec. sets of lunges, jumping jacks, jumpees, and other sources of torment exercises that I have blocked out forgotten as well. Actually, this was a pretty good workout, but I wish that I had done a bit more. There is lots of snow falling today in Raleigh, and I am afraid that the gym will be closed tomorrow.