smart wonder core | Blue Runnings

Why don’t I have a six-pack yet?!

by Sarah J.

In my mind, working out should be a bit like levelling up in a videogame (can I still call them that given noone uses videos anymore?!). When you complete a workout, your body should be immediately toned up afterwards, and then it gradually atrophies back to its pre-workout state the longer you leave before your next workout. Working out too hard would give you a super-buff appearance, but also a stat penalty like ‘pulled muscle’ or ‘gym ban’ which means you have to leave a certain amount of time before you’re allowed to workout again.

I read somewhere a while ago (a forgotten and unverified, likely click-bait source!) that it takes 4 weeks of a program – food or exercise – before you notice a difference, 6 weeks before your close friends and family do, and 8 weeks for everyone else. 3 weeks into my ‘healthy me’ kick – she says while chowing down on cocopops while writing this – I guess I shouldn’t be beating myself up about not looking any different yet. I should however get back to eating healthy. Tomorrow. Gotta play the long game with this sort of thing!

Anyway, we’re only here because I wanted to give a bit more detail on my gym workout yesterday and decided it would probably end up too waffley for facebook – so knowing I’m already writing a blog post, I have made it more waffley before I even get to the bit I wanted to share!

Facebook people will already know, P bought a ‘Smart Wonder Core’ just after Christmas, after I told him how much it would be to use the local gym each session while I’m at Run England. The theory was he’d have to use it 10x and it would have paid itself off, and every session after that would be ‘free’. So far, I don’t think he’s been on it more than twice but I’m sure that’ll change now I’ve provided exercise stickers for the calendar for him 😉 Nothing motivates quite like smiley face stickers.

I’ve had a quick low-resistance go through the exercises just to see how they feel, and a 2-circuit, 20 rep each go through of the seven exercises shown on the guide that comes with it, but last night was my first ‘proper’ session with it – and I was definitely sweating rather than glowing through it! Rather than having a rest and a reference check of what I was supposed to be doing between exercises, I made sure I had them in an order where I was not going to be doing the same muscle groups consecutively, and also chopped up the repeats so I wasn’t doing everything once and going back and doing everything again as a whole, and moved straight from one exercise to the next without a break – I’ll explain more in a minute.

The exercises on the guide are as follows;