House Guest Workout

What do you do when you have company? You know, the kind that you wonder if they’ll ever leave?

Well, my Cali BFF, Sylvia came for the weekend, and you’d think that I was trying to get rid of her. Not so.

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We sit butt to butt on the couch with our lap tops. She’s ‘the Pilates Chick’ and helps her readers with helpful tips and tricks to tighten and tone their core. And we do other fun things too, but we like to GSD (get stuff done) to help our readers too.

While Sylvia has Pilates methods to slam the core, I take a different approach.   I figure you get lots of core activation when you’re throwing up, so I prefer a challenge workout that takes you to the brink of barfing.

Sylvia is a trooper, she never says die.

I honestly was NOT trying to get her to leave or barf. After all, she’s my BFF. She’s been to Calgary twice now and I hope that she continues to come. Even though she was close to a full body search in customs (I think I know what part of her body they were looking to search ;))

Sylvia seems to think she can tough the weather in Canada. She came downstairs this morning saying, ‘Look, I”m wearing a tank top’ to which I said, “Sylvia, it’s called central heating, don’t go outside’.

But I made her weather the weather. My son had a spring football game and Sylvia was ‘game’.

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We were a little chilly…
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Big win for Sam’s team with chilly fans…

Before the football game, Sylvia and I hit the gym, as we always do, whether it’s a home workout or one in my regular gym.

Sylvia is always ready. I set up the workout and I asked her, ‘Do you want to know how many rounds we’re doing?’, to which she replied,  ‘Nope, let’s go.’

I thought she was going to fall over when I told her we were doing burpee pull ups.

Here’s how to tackle the burpee pull up if you’re not quite there: We chose to do them in a Smith machine. We set the bar up at about a foot above her head so that she could do a jump assisted pull up and slow decent.

I did the pull up on the higher support bar.

I was so proud of her doing 5 sets of burpee pull ups. We did a minute of work with 5 seconds to transition to the next move. We both did HIIT together, then we both did strength together, so when I was skipping, she was doing her burpee pull ups. I was nagging/cheering her on. She rocked that bar.

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Here’s our workout:

5 rounds of 1 min work with 15 second transition

  • burpee pull up
  • alternate stiff legged deadlift with dumb bells
  • skip
  • BB squat (choose a weight you can get about 10 reps in within the minute)

Good times.

Remarkably, Sylvia will NOT find an early flight tomorrow (I wouldn’t take her to the airport even if she did want to leave. I live in Canada, but my house is like a Hotel California for my Cali BFF). Sylvia will  find ANY reason to return and the welcome mat is ALWAYS  down for her.

I wonder what we’ll come up with tomorrow?

By the way, if you want to rock the pull up bar, like Sylvia did, check out my pull up program.

PS. If you like this workout, you’re gonna LOVE Challenge Fat Loss coming out May 7th. Stay tuned 🙂