Fitness: Favourite Pregnancy Workouts

Hellooo! Yep, I still have that Seattle post in my drafts, but we are getting towards the end of my pregnancy and I really wanted to document some of my workouts for future reference. My friend introduced me to a YouTube channel called Pregnancy & Postpartum TV and I have really appreciated her channel as a pregnancy workout & education resource.

I was basically a sick potato for the duration of my first trimester and absolutely could not move. However, I started feeling much better in my second trimester. It took time for me to adjust back to West Coast time and get over jet lag after my trip to Asia, but after I finally had enough rest and energy, I started doing her workouts as well as taking regular walks.

I set myself a daily step goal of 7,500 steps with the understanding that my realistic goal was no fewer than 4,500 steps/day. Even if I don’t go out for a walk, I tried to do one of her indoor walking workouts. Starting late February, I was consistently exercising 3-4x/week, which has since increased to 4-5x/week. I’m still working out but it’s definitely getting harder in my third trimester and baby is growing rapidly!

I started on this New 14 Day Pregnancy Workout Challenge, which was very helpful for getting to know some of the basics of how best to exercise during pregnancy. But to be honest, I didn’t end up finishing the entire 14 days (I finished day 11) as I started wanting to her other videos instead.

I’ve since tried a decent number of her videos and here are some of my absolute favourites that I always return to:

The walking workouts include a lot of full body cardio and totally help with my daily step goal. The other two also end up with me working up a sweat (but still able to maintain a conversation!) and were extra enjoyable because I could feel myself getting stronger as I repeated them on later days.

I am pretty certain I have built up a bit of extra muscle from working out during pregnancy, especially with all the squats I’ve been doing haha. I swear pregnancy is literally the best time to build muscle: you have built in progressive overload with the increased weight of your belly, you’re already eating in a surplus and your literal goal is to see the number on the scale increase at a healthy rate.

Plus you get the added benefit of exercising helping to manage your weight so that you’re not gaining toooo much. That said, I think I’m currently trending a little high on my weight gain, BUT my weight fluctuates a lot like it always does depending on my diet, my bowel movements, my workouts etc.

The photo above was taken just a couple of days ago. I’ve definitely gained some fat and am a similar size to when I first started my fitness journey in 2020 albeit with a much larger belly, but that’s to be expected! I could do a bit better with my weight management now, but to be honest, I’d rather just listen to my body and give my body whatever it needs to keep baby growing well.

We can’t wait to meet her <3

Muchos love,

Bobbie

Fitness: Grow A Booty Challenge Week 1

Image screenshot: Chloe Ting 2022 Grow A Booty Challenge

I interrupt my Seattle posts to bring you… a new workout challenge. Haha. The last time I did a home workout was in August. Goodness, has it been a month and a half already? Per my final thoughts for the Get Abs Challenge, my body needed a break from doing both wushu and home workouts.

The HIIT was too much for me to handle, and I am very glad that I took time off from home workouts to allow my body to rest in between intense wushu classes. I was working towards my yellow belt (which I’ve now obtained) but it was just getting harder to keep up my stamina when my body wasn’t getting sufficient recovery time.

However, I must be recovered by now because all of last week I felt like I wanted to do more workouts than I was doing. Now that I’m on my yellow belt I am learning staff, which is nearly impossible to practice at home so my exercise has less than halved.

This morning I found a bit of time and just really wanted to do a workout… so I went for it.

I’m still going to be doing my wushu classes 2-3x/week and I’ll listen to my body to see if I have the energy to do these workouts the rest of the time. This challenge is complementary to my wushu since my form requires so much leg strength so, while I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be able to progress through it, I’ll aim to complete it before December!

(That’s my code for: don’t expect this post to be updated frequently lolol sorryyy.) Anyways, on with the post!

Read More

Fitness: Get Abs Challenge Days 10-14

Image screenshot: Chloe Ting 2022 Get Abs Challenge

Click here to read my update for days 1-3 of this challenge.
Click here to read my update for days 4-6 of this challenge.
Click here to read my update for days 7-9 of this challenge.

Originally I was planning to have three more posts – days 10-12, 13-15, 16-18. However, day 13 is a rest day, so I’ve decided to split the remaining days into two posts instead, each with 4 days’ workouts in them. So this will be the penultimate post for this challenge!

I’m kind of amazed that I’m even 50% through. I’m already starting to feel unmotivated, but thanks to my teammate I do actually still want to get it all completed. I was even thinking of just taking an extra rest day today since I worked out yesterday (and my glutes are sore!!), but after discussing with my teammate, she encouraged me to get it done today.

We both know that I’m going to get disqualified this week, but she said why not do one final day before I get disqualified tomorrow for falling more than 5 days behind? Tomorrow is another wushu day so I won’t be doing the challenge, but at least we’ll have done 10 days together. Couldn’t really say no to that!

I hope I’ll still be able to finish up the challenge after I get disqualified. I want it on my profile page lol.

Read More

Fitness: Get Abs Challenge Days 4-6

Image screenshot: Chloe Ting 2022 Get Abs Challenge

Click here to read my update for days 1-3 of this challenge.

It’s Saturday! Are we on day 4 already? Wow, where has the time gone? You may (or may not) be surprised – usually on Saturdays I do wushu, but not today! Nope. Why? Because I needed to do my Chloe Ting workout otherwise I’d be disqualified early from my team and I didn’t want to screw up our team score too badly.

But oh man. Today was not a good workout day. I didn’t feel well to begin with (hello Aunt Flo and what’s up headache), but I wanted to be on track to hit the 25% goal so that we can at least get a rank B for the team challenge.

My teammate has been slaying the challenge as per usual (literally the girl doesn’t miss a day) and a few days ago I got the countdown timer saying I needed to complete 25% within 3 days or something. The challenge is 18 days long so that meant I needed to complete day 5 by tomorrow. So that meant no extra rest days for me this week – I had to workout daily to get 25% on time.

…or so I thought.

It’s only after I completed today’s workout that I realised I still had until end of day on Monday to complete Day 5. Gah, I totally could have taken a rest day today as long as I worked out tomorrow and Monday. That said, usually I take Sundays as my rest days, so perhaps this worked out for the best and I’ll take my rest day tomorrow after all. It’s still far better than having zero rest days at all this week so I could keep up, so I’ll take that as a win.

I’m expecting to get disqualified next week but still continuing this challenge at my own pace. We’ll see how it goes!

Read More

Fitness: Get Abs Challenge Days 1-3

Image screenshot: Chloe Ting 2022 Get Abs Challenge

Good day to you! After much deliberation (no deliberation at all) and consideration (a very low amount of considering occurred), I decided to go ahead and do Chloe’s newest challenge after all. I got through a week of Caroline’s Epic Heat, and, while very enjoyable, turned out to still be a bit too much for me at present.

Not to say that Epic Heat wasn’t great – it was. It was maybe too good. Or, at least, too intense in difficulty for me right now in between my intense wushu classes. I ended up so exhausted last week that I wasn’t able to do any workouts beyond my 3 wushu classes. In fact, even in my wushu classes I was very low on energy compared to before. I think I probably went too hard before and my body just decided it wasn’t having it any longer.

I want to push myself, but not to the extent that I need almost an entire week off from regular workouts to recover, with my energy also being impacted for wushu classes. Therefore, we’re going to go ahead with the Get Abs Challenge and see how we do.

I’m doing this challenge with a friend again because working out as a team genuinely makes such a massive difference to my motivation. I might actually fail the team challenge because I won’t be working out on my wushu days, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

For this challenge, I’m going to be switching up the format of my posts a little. Rather than doing Weeks 1-3, I’ll be adding a new post for 3 days at a time. There are 18 days in total, so expect 6 posts in total from me. Hopefully it won’t take me 6 weeks to complete!

To be clear, I’m absolutely not expecting abs from this challenge (although, I kind of already have some ab definition so it’s not entirely outside the realms of possibility), but I do genuinely enjoy working my core. My core is incredibly weak, and core strength is vital for stability for a multitude of movements and lifting, so I’m hoping to improve my core strength since the challenge is going to be quite ab-heavy.

Read More