Due to overwhelming requests (just one) to do a weekly post on fitness, here it is.

It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time at the gym, usually about 12 hours a week. It’s my muse. I get a lot of inspiration for my blog from being around the idiots that work out there. That is motivation for me to go. In the summer however, I like to spend my time doing other more beer-drinking type things. I still go to the gym 4 times a week- nothing can replace weight training for muscle tone and definition- but I take my cardio down a notch during the summer and try to spend only 5 hours a week in the actual gym.

3 ways I’m able to keep my awesome figure while cutting my gym time by a third:

1) I walk…a lot. I enjoy walking for it’s meditative purposes…I pop in my iPod and let Pearl Jam decide my mood for me. I much prefer a 20 minute walk over a 5 minute car ride. (I hate driving more than anything in the world). On an average day, I probably spend about an hour walking just to get places. Sometimes I call up my gal-pal who lives upstairs and we go for a walk while spilling the juicy details of our (and our friends) love lives (or lack thereof). Walking burns a lot more calories than one would think. Going the same distance, you burn as much calories walking as you do running (it just takes much longer and doesn’t have the cardio-vascular benefits of running).

2) I bike to commute. People don’t realise how easy biking is. There is a massive hill to climb to get from downtown to my place…the first time I took my bike out this year, I had to gear down to the easiest gear to climb it, but the second time I did it without changing gears at all. Biking is much better on joints than running is, and it gets you places faster. I bought my bike 4 years ago when I first got into mountain biking, which is another awesome sport that I wish I still did.

3) I do yoga. It’s so much easier to get up early to do a round of yoga than it is to get up to run 5 miles. It stretches me out from the workout the day before, calms me down for the depressing day of not being employed ahead of me, and I work muscles that the leg press just can’t get. My goal for the summer is to get a god-forsaken forward bend done right. All the years of weight training have left my body stiff…I need to loosen it up. For people who play hockey, yoga is an excellent sport to get rid of the aches and pains that are inherent with hockey. An hour a week of keeping your spine straight while bending every other part of your body will make up for spending all that time hunched over the puck.

So there you go. FitDarcie does a fitness post. Fred, does this meet your standards? Other readers, care to hear more?

Tags: fitness, summer fitness