Good morning! I mentioned on Instagram last week that I had a day where I could’ve easily skipped a workout. It was pouring rain, I was in a training all day at work so I couldn’t go to the gym during my lunch break, I had an eye exam in Boston after work and the traffic getting home was ridiculous. All of which could be very valid excuses for me to have skipped the workout. But the thing was, I didn’t WANT to skip the workout. While I was driving home, I had an internal conversation with myself trying to figure out what I should do. I was looking for ways to talk myself out of the workout since I rarely ever do that, but all the signs pointed to me doing the workout:

• I wasn’t tired
• I wasn’t sore
• It wasn’t too late
• I could do it at-home
• I had eaten lots of carbs that day so I felt like I had loads of energy to burn
• I genuinely WANTED to workout

So, what did I do? I worked out! But to save time, I decided to just workout at home rather than go to the gym and fighting the 6:30pm crowds where I knew I would get annoyed and frusterated and end up wasting more time just walking around trying to find a spot to workout and equipment to use that wouldn’t be in the midst of all the chaos.

The upside of being stuck in traffic was that not only did I have time to go through the mental checklist for deciding whether or not to workout, but I also had time to plan the workout in my head! I don’t know what made me think of doing a workout like this, but it ended up being a really good one- and, with 10 exercises in the mix, it helped keep things interesting and helped keep me from totally dreading all the reps!

The goal of the workout is to complete 1000 total reps, which means that’s 100 reps of each of the 10 exercises 😉 The beauty, though, is that you get to choose how you want to complete it! I opted to do 5 rounds of 20 reps each, but you could easily do 4 rounds of 25 reps, 2 rounds of 50 reps or choose to do all 100 reps of each exercise before moving on to the next. I moved from the first exercise to the last in order like that, but when I did an abbreviated version of this in class, some people paired together 2 or 3 exercises and completed those and then moved on to another 2 or 3 exercises. So, you could do all of your least favorite exercises first when you have more energy and save the exercises you like for the end. The options are endless!

I think most of these moves are fairly straight forward so I’ll spare you the written explanations. For the lunges and single leg dead lifts, you’ll do a total of 50 reps on each leg rather than 100 to help keep the workout a little shorter. For the others that require a left and a right movement (high knees, mountain climbers, Russian twists, etc.), you’ll do 100 reps on each side. By doing it this way, it took me about 32 minutes to complete this. When I taught it in my classes as the 500 rep workout, I had a few people finish in about 15 minutes- just to give you and idea on timing in case you’re short on time. I was huffing and puffing throughout the whole thing!

As always, I’d love to know if you try this!

Questions for you: Do you have conversations to talk yourself into or out of a workout? Do you make compromises or deals with yourself if you end up going when you really don’t want to? Do you like to workout at home?