Hooray for BOOT CAMPS!!

Last night, against the advice of my PT, I did my first boot-camp style workout at the gym and LOVED it! (Side note: My PT didn't want me to do it because that doing the boot camp in-between my sessions with him would put me at three days of weight-training... he said it was "okay" but that I might be sore after and he is not going to take it easy on me when I see him later today... he's so nice!)

Anyway, yesterday about an hour before the "camp" started, I was so nervous... almost wanted to back out because I didn't know what to expect. I made my boyfriend and a couple of friends sign up for the camp with me so I would feel a little better.

Well, the minutes were counting down and when I got the basketball courts (this is where they set it up) I was surprised to see that there were only a handful of people there... 15 people max. We dived up into three groups but somehow the numbers were wrong because my group only had three people and one of the other groups had like 6 or 7 people. Anyway, in the court, there were three stations set up where we would be spending about 3-minutes at each station and rotate through the circuits. The first station was a plyo section (thank gawd for P90X!), second station was an agility/cardio area, and the last station was a strength station.

The first circuit consisted of:
plyo: 1 min of jumping squats, 1 min of rockstar jumps, 1 min of burpees
agility: 3 minutes of skaters (jumping for side-to-side in a low,
balanced stance)
strength: 1 min of squats, 1 min of lunges, 1 min of push-ups

Second circuit got a little harder:
plyo: kept the same 3 exercises... and those were hard enough
agility: 3 mins of ladder running
strength: 1 min 1-leg squats, 1 min sumo squats, 1 min of push-ups

Third circuit got even harder:
plyo: same 3 exercises
agility: 3 mins of faster ladder running/jumping
strength: 1 min jumping lunges, 1 min of open push-ups, 1 min jumping
1-leg toe touch

Last 15 minutes were spent on core work: crunches, bicycles, hip
raises, cobra/superman and boat hold.

So what was the best part of the boot camp... ME! (Warning: a little arrogance ahead!) Thanks to P90X, I could go through ALL three circuits without stopping. I could do the plyo moves but three minutes of non-stop plyo was hard so of course I threw in my own breaks. At the agility and strength stations, the trainers kept using me as an example for proper form and how to intensify the moves! For example, on the skaters it's just natural for me to only use one leg (vs. putting the back foot on the ground after the jump) and I wasn't even trying to do the harder version, but the trainer pointed out what I was doing and told the others "this is the advanced way". I was probably the "chubbiest" person there and to have the trainers notice my form/stamina/coordination felt so good! It was actually a little embarrassing.

Anyway it's good to know that I can hang with the "big dogs" at the gym... and even surpass some of them! BTW I was the last one standing in my group when circuit 3 came around... the one guy in my group dropped out after circuit 1 and the other girl in my group dropped out after circuit 2! :) Okay, I'll go deflate my head now!