Day 34 - Kenpo X

Today I decided to do kenpo wearing 5lb ankle weights. It definitely made the kicks harder and I felt like I got a good workout in my butt and hips. I think I'll probably continue to use the weights from now on.

Today was also the first day that I used my new heart rate monitor. I'm still unsure if I'm setting my limits right, but I decided to set my lower limit at 133bpm (the lower limit for a moderate workout) and the upper limit at 170bpm (the upper limit for an intense workout). I spent most of the time in the 160's to 170's. If I noticed I was going over 170, I would pause and get it down a little bit, which is what Tony says to do.

From what I've read, staying in the low to moderate workout levels is better for weight loss, but this was pretty near impossible. So I just focused on trying to keep my heart rate below 175ish.
I ended up burning over 500 kcals during the kenpo workout. Afterwards, I went for a walk with my friend since it was so nice out today, so today I burned a total of 930 kcals!! This is really good because I had pizza for supper! I really haven't been doing very well with my nutrition lately.

Meals:

• Breakfast: 2 pieces multigrain toast with almond butter, juice
• Supper: 1 piece of pizza, garlic fingers with donair sauce, small glass of diet coke
• Snack: chocolate bunny, blueberries

Day ?

Today I skipped my yoga workout for a couple of reasons:
Every Wednesday, we go out for supper with friends at 6pm. Yoga almost always falls on a Wednesday as well, and it's really hard to a) do yoga after a meal, and b) fit the 1 1/2 hr long workout in when I get home after 8pm. So I decided to not do anything today and do yoga tomorrow. That way I've shifted my workouts so that I shouldn't have yoga on Wed.'s anymore. I figure it's ok that I took a day off since I've only missed 4 workout days in the past 5-6 weeks.

On my way home from work today, I stopped in at Sears and got myself a heart rate monitor (Polar F4). I played around with it this evening, but don't quite have the hang of it yet and the manual isn't that great. I'll try and figure it out this weekend.

I do have one question though that maybe people can answer for me. When you're setting your lower and upper limits for bpm, should the range be the lowest and highest you want to acheive during exercise? Or should the lowest be just above your resting HR, and highest be the absolute max? The monitor beeps when you're out of your limit (which can be turned off), so it's a little annoying when it beeps when it's lower than the range set. Any suggestions?