Just Part Of My Journey

As part of my health and fitness journey a few things have changed over the last few months. Some day I might share about them, but right now I'm still kind of absorbing some of the changes and acclimating to a somewhat new lifestyle. Since some of this is new to me I hired a coach to help me out (it's kind of a long story and at some point I'll share how I found this coach).

My coach had this plan for me for this week:

Try to increase my protein intake. Here are the ways we decided I could do this

1. Have a protein drink with a meal
2. Eat cottage cheese
3. Eat my Greek yogurt/sugar-free vanilla pudding mixture (1 & 1/2 cup Greek yogurt, 1/2 to 3/4 cup milk, 1 pkg. sugar free pudding in the flavor of your choice) as a dessert

Do my strength workouts 2 times and do some body-weight work on Friday when I'm out of town.

Cardio (running or biking) for 30 minutes 5 times throughout the week - My coach doesn't think I'll need to keep this up indefinitely but we talked about how I am very sporadic with cardio work right now. For instance, last week I did a 20 mile (1 hour 45 minute) bike ride on Monday and didn't do anything else the rest of the week. For now we are focusing on getting some consistency going with cardio. My coach is working with me really well. I actually enjoy biking and running, but have gotten away from it. My coach isn't making me do anything I don't like.

Mobility work - I expressed my concern that I feel sore and tight a lot of the time and I really want to do some yoga. I like my 1 hour yoga classes I've gone to, but am not good about getting to them after I'm home for the evening so we decided I should aim for 3 - 15 minute yoga sessions this week.

Nutrition - track calories to see what the increase in protein is going to do to my overall calorie intake.

Sleep - this may be the hardest one to achieve - shut down all electronics (except tv) at 8:30. In bed at 9:00!

This may seem like a lot of changes, but it's not.

•  I did a stint of trying to increase protein and it was working, but I didn't like the meals I was eating so we just tweaked what I was doing so this isn't really new
• I have a solid foundation of strength work, usually getting in 3 workouts a week. 
• I've done the cardio work before but just kind of got away from it when I was focusing on strength work so I need to find a way to do both because I legitimately like both and feel like I'm missing out by only doing strength workouts. But I have to find a balance because I don't want to workout for hours on end.
• Mobility work - I'd consider this new as I haven't been consistent with this for a LONG time
• Tracking calories - I did this for a month, but stopped last week because I was super busy
• Sleep - I've done this before, but not recently. I would consider this new and probably the most important. I feel like everything else above would probably fall in place if I could simply accomplish the sleep goal!

So there it is, my plan for the week that my coach, with my input, worked out for me. Now I'm off to do some yoga!