30 Day Challenge

     Something about telling enough people that I plan to do something guilts me into doing it. So here it goes. I am going home for the first time in over a year in 32 days (yes, I know the exact number of days). I was just getting into working out everyday when 2 things happened. 1) I got sick...I tend to baby myself when I get sick. 2) I started school full time...with a full time job. Aka, lots of reasons to stop working out because I am too tired. So, now I am enrolling myself into my own special 30 day program.

     Basic tenets: I WILL work out at least 5 days a week, but my goal is 6. I will try to avoid treating myself with chips and sweets for going to the gym. I will continue to drink tons of water...not hard to do when you live in the dryness equivalent to the desert. I will do strength training, cardio and stretching. I will stretch every day.

Specifics:

Areas I want to work on: Butt (Goal: tone), thighs (Goal: tone), stomach (Goal: tone), arms (Goal: Build muscle and tone)

Arms:

“Determine the maximum weight you can lift for each exercise so you can build a workout routine around your maximum for each exercise. Your maximum is the amount of weight you can lift one time before failure. If you can do several reps with a weight, add more weight to determine your one-time max. Perform a warm-up set of an exercise, performing five reps of the exercise using 60 percent of your maximum weight. Take a 2- to 3-minute break, then repeat the set of five lifts using 80 percent of your max. Take another break, then perform three more sets of five reps using 100 percent of your max. Rest between each set. Perform all five sets of the same exercise before moving on to the next. Recheck max each week.” Livestrong

Everything else:

Use weight to perform eight to 10 repetitions of an exercise, using 40 to 70 percent of your maximum weight. Take only 1-minute breaks between sets. You can move from exercise to exercise each set. Repeat 3-4 times per exercise.

Cardio:

Exercise at a pace that I can maintain for 15 minutes (At this point, that is running at about 9 on the treadmill)

Each week, increase the time I run by 5 minutes.

Week 1: 15 minutes

Week 2: 20 minutes

Week 3: 25 minutes

Week 4: 30 minutes

During the end of my third week, start adding sprints. Sprint for 30-90 seconds and then take a 2 minute break.

Wish me luck! I will keep you updated on my progress! I know I have been a horrible blogger recently, but if your wondering why...check above. Work, school and now exercise! 

Musings on self improvement

Self improvement means so many different things to different people. For me it comes down to several different categories...

1. General health and wellness (shocking I know, such an individual concept)
2. Developing my interests and hopefully turning them into new hobbies
3. Scheduling...to get more out of my life
---and finally and most importantly---
4. Researching work at home/ work for myself ideas and hopefully going down that path myself sometime

With that said, at this point, the reason I am at my current job is because of the money and because it looks good on a resume. If I could find a way to work from home, I would take it. The perks of working for yourself are endless. You work as hard as you want to in order to achieve your goals; not the goals of someone else. You can dictate your own schedule. You can be involved in several things at once, keeping things from becoming too monotonous.  Now...with that being said, I don't even know where to start. Is this even an achievable goal without some great business plan? I have a very specific idea of what I am interested in, but is that marketable? Is there a way for me to combine things I hear about (but often end up being a scam) like data entry, medical transcriptions, coaching etc...? Anyone with any knowledge of this, please enlighten me with answers. I have a website with my area of interest, so please check it out and let me know what you think. The name is silly and too long I realized, but a lot of the good domain names are gone, so don' judge.

http://www.babycentricassistant.com/default.html

I've thought of one way I may be able to combine interests with a business idea, but would anything come of it? I am very pragmatic, maybe a little too much so sometimes...so I tend to over think things. Coaching sounds interesting to me, pregnancy and motherhood is the thing in life that interests me the most...so could I coach soon to be pregnant-pregnant-mothers? The only hang up I foresee is that I have never been pregnant. Small issue? Big issue? Barbara, you're a mom, what do you think?

Do any of my readers, or passerby's of the blog, have any experience with work at home/ home businesses? Or any idea they wish they could turn into a business? Let me know, I love hearing from my followers!