Want Results? This is What Your Workout Routine Needs:

Hello Lovely Readers!

I have gone through many ups and downs over the years when it comes to sticking to fitness. The big thing for me is sticking with it, no matter the crazy things that are going on in my life. I always forget that sticking with my health and fitness and striving to meet my goals will help me cope with all the other things going on.

As some of you may know, I am in the midst of completing Arbonne’s 30 Days to Healthy Living challenge. If you’ve been keeping up with me on social media, you will know it’s been such a rewarding journey thus far. I feel more confident than I have in a very long time. Plus, I am becoming a stronger Athlete, a more confident person, and overall happier.

Knowing Where to Start…

When I first started going to the gym in my senior year of high school, I literally would run on the treadmill to Fergalicious, jump off, and peddle on the spin stations as fast as I could for 20 minutes. I had no clue what I was doing, and at the time, didn’t even know that you could change the resistance on the bikes…

oh yeah, and let’s not forget the period of high school where Just Dance Wii was my go to exercise (don’t judge).

Well this was great for losing a lot of weight, but it didn’t really change my body composition. For years I worked out, and though I learned a few things along the way, the one thing I wasn’t integrating into my work outs was strength training. This resulted in my plateau and huge frustrations that I was working out regularly, but nothing seemed to be changing.

Well fast forward to the Fall of 2017. I joined pole society at the University of Glasgow and started to pole regularly. This sport has always been a great love of mine, but also has been one of the most challenging things I have done. It required a lot of strength that I did not have, and I again, became frustrated that a year and a half of doing this sport and I could not even begin to try half the moves my other pole friends had mastered.

So back to this health journey. I knew that getting in shape needed to be different this time and so I did a ton of research. Turns out strength training would solve all my issues that I had been having, however, it was having a balanced work out routine that would yield the best results.

My doggo likes to join me for a wee pole sesh ❤

Having a balanced routine that includes a mix of strength, cardio and stretch will help your muscles build, burn the most fat, and allow for flexibility and muscle recovery.

What do you need to include in your fitness regimen?

Your fitness regimen will entirely depend on how active you want to be. If you are just getting into fitness, it is suggested that you start with maybe 2-3 days a week and build up to more days as you get more in shape. This will keep you from hurting yourself or causing too much strain on your muscles.

ACSM Guidelines suggest that we should be getting 150-300 minutes of exercise in a week. This equates to about 3-5 days a week of 1 hour work outs. However, this includes NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis). These are activities that would not count as exercise per say, but that you burn calories such as vacuuming, taking the dog for a walk etc. Basically, the more that you make a point to get move throughout your day, the healthier you will be, (sounds like common sense right?).

Ideally you should have a good mix of exercise methods in your fitness regimen in order to burn fat and to increase fitness ability. Here is what you need to include:

1. Cardio

The ACSM recommends about 75-150 minutes a week of intense aerobic activity. So about 2-3 hours a week you should spend doing some vigorous cardio such as spin, running, cardio dance, or HIIT.

However, not all cardio is created equal. If your focus is weight loss, studies show that HIIT training is the most effective for burning fat and building endurance and stamina. Plus, most HIIT exercises incorporate strength moves, so you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. This form of exercise is when you do short bursts of high intensity workouts with short rests in between. HIIT trainings are great because they can be incorporated into just about any routine. Plus, HIIT has been shown to be very efficient in burning fat and actually has shown to increase your metabolism! Plus you are building endurance through raising and lowering your heart rate.

I recently did a quick 15 minute HIIT on the treadmill before working on some strength moves. In 15 minutes I was clocked at having burned 160 calories. It was the most intense 15 minute work out I had ever done! But it felt amazing 🙂

Check out this 25 minute HIIT workout here

2. Strength Workouts

So I do lift weights, but only about once a week. Plus, I haven’t worked up the nerve to take a gym selfie yet, so you get to see my lovely at-home-barre workout selfies! whoohoo!

I consider pole, barre and Vinyasa yoga a strength workout. They work your muscles and help you build strength and flexibility, plus they are so much fun! I love Barre because it is easy to do from the comfort of your own home, and you can use a chair.

Barre is my fave way to tone when not on the pole 🙂

Strength workouts are a great way to see results because as you build muscle, you burn more fat. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate. If you build muscle it helps you burn off unwanted and stubborn fat and it helps you keep it off! So if you want your workouts to be efficient, it is important to include strength training.

There are so many other advantages to incorporating strength training into your exercise routine. By doing so, you are actually helping your body protect bone and muscle mass and increase cardiovascular health.

My favorite strength workouts are those that incorporate some sort of dance or stretch. So I only lift actual weights about once a week. Barre, pole and vinyasa are all amazing ways to build strength throughout your entire body, so don’t be afraid to stir up the pot and try something new!

3. Stretch Days

I love yoga as a means of exercise because while you are giving your muscles a nice stretch, you are also building strength! So, double win 🙂

There is a lot of argument on whether yoga should be treated as a recovery workout. While some forms yoga deliver amazing benefits to recovering muscles, not all forms are good as a means of recovery per se.

Yoga such as Hatha yoga, which is low impact and focused on stretch, is an amazing way to recover. This is true especially if you do a lot of weight lifting or put your muscles under a lot of strain. Vinyasa yoga, which incorporates strength exercises, should not be used for muscle recovery.

I love to integrate yoga with the rest of my strength workouts. I practice primarily Vinyasa flow, which allows me to build my strength as well as my flexibility and balance. I have become much more flexible and my pole practice has become much better since starting Vinyasa.

But either way, practicing yoga reduces your risk of injury when doing other work outs, helps build stamina and helps increase your mood!

4. Rest Days

You need to take days off to be successful. Your muscles need recovery time!

Yes, You really do need to take rest days

When we work out, what happens is you are creating micro-tears in your muscular tissue. These tears get filled in with more tissue which becomes a larger muscle 🙂 However, the only time that these tears heal is when we are resting. If you don’t properly give your body a chance to rest after workouts you will plateau in your progress. In fact, overstraining your body can lead to immunity issues and may even lead to injury.

However, just because it is a rest day doesn’t mean you should lounge about. Aim for an active rest day, where you focus on low impact activities such as going for a walk, hatha yoga or even counting those NEAT activities 🙂

Constant work and strain on your muscles can be more detrimental to your fitness gains than help. It is important to give your muscles the time they need to repair themselves and grow stronger! Like you, they need a little bit of a rest period.

So like everything else, your routine needs to be balanced.

Switch it up

Constantly doing the same routine will end up in a plateau. If you keep doing the same circuits, your muscles will actually adapt and will stop building. Not to mention, the more you switch things up, the more muscles you will end up working. Thus, you will become stronger from head to toe.

Here are some ideas to help you mix up your routine :

Stregth:

• Barre
• Pole
• Vinyasa Yoga
• Wight lifting
• Les Mills Body Pump
• HIIT Strength

Cardio:

• Zumba
• Running
• Spin
• Swimming
• Kickboxing
• HIIT Cardio

If you don’t want to go to the gym for whatever reason, YouTube and Pop sugar are amazing resources for free work out videos that you can do from the comfort of your own home.

I usually do most of my work outs at the gym, but because my gym doesn’t offer a Barre class, sometimes I will just resort to doing one in my bedroom. These are my favorite ones, they are short but are very effective:

What my routine looks like:

So I aim to have two rest days a week, but I try to make them active rest days. This might mean that I go for a small walk, or make an effort to walk and stretch more at work. I aim to get 10,000 steps in on my rest days. So far, I have not even come close to this goal! I’ve been hitting around 7,000 steps on my rest days thus far. I know this will increase when I move back to Scotland for Uni, because I will literally be walking everywhere.

I have always kind of stuck to dance cardio as my work out of choice. If you can’t tell, I prefer work outs that are fun and integrate some sort of dance or stretch 🙂 I also do various strength exercises such as vinyasa yoga, pole, body pump, and sometimes a wee barre session.

Here is how I schedule my current workouts 🙂

This schedule is based on a 300 minute exercise week. I attempt to so some form of exercise 5 days a week. This has really been helpful for fitting in cardio, strength and stretch. On days I don’t have time, I aim to do a 15/20 minute HIIT workout and maybe some yoga just to make sure I am still doing something active.

I take two rest days, two cardio, and two-three strength days. I practice a type of yoga known as Vinyasa flow, which is designed to be more physically demanding. While you do stretch in Vinyasa, you also do a lot of strength building, so I count my yoga day as a stretch/strength day. I do switch this up time to time just to make sure I am not plateauing!

What is your favorite type of workout?

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Six Easy Steps to Healthy, Glowing Skin

*This post contains affiliate links. This allows me to make a small commission if you decide to purchase one of the linked products. This is at no extra cost to you. This article reflects my own honest opinions on all products.

Hello all you lovelies,

Since summer is now in full swing, I wanted to talk a little bit about skin care. I don’t know about you, but in the summer wearing foundation is not something I really want to do. I get really hot, and all my expensive makeup just melts off my face.

So in these hot months, I like to focus more on my skincare routine than my makeup routine. Everyone’s skin is different and has different needs, however, I always aim to have a routine that does a couple of very essential universal things:

Skin Care is Self Care ❤

Protects skin from sun damage

This is so important to do all year around, yet even more essential in the summer. We tend to be out and about a lot and are susceptible to much higher levels of UV rays. This can cause wrinkles, sun spots and other forms of sun damage. Plus, wearing sunscreen consistently lowers your risk for melanoma. I always have a good sunscreen in my beauty routine. Even if I have makeup that has SPF in it, I always put a layer of sunscreen on at the end of my morning skin care routine.

Corrects discoloration, fine lines and pores

These are some of the main reasons why we use foundation. So focusing your skin care routine on your specific skin needs is so important to building an effective skin care routine that reduces the need for coverage. Normally, this means using serums that treat your skin from the inside, investing in a good CC cream and keeping up with your skin care routine twice daily.

Uses brands that are clean!

This focus on clean skin care is emerging rapidly in the beauty field. It’s starting to become more common for brands to clearly state that they are clean brands. If you go into Sephora now, they clearly mark all the clean makeup and beauty brands with a little green leaf sign.

For those of you that are not familiar what ‘clean’ beauty is, it is simply products that omit harmful ingredients. There are literally thousands of harmful ingredients that have been used in beauty and skin care products. The most common things to stay away from are parabens, synthetic chemicals, sulfates and waxes.

I am using Arbonne’s Advanced Prepwork line, I also use other brands to supplement my routine, but all the brands I use are clean brands. I’ve linked the products I use down at the bottom of the post 🙂

would you all be interested in a post going into more detail about clean skin care?

My Skin Care Essentials:

I will be going over all the lovely things that I integrate into my own skin care routine, but first, let’s start by going over some of the most important products for healthy, glowing skin. If you looked in my collection, these are the three things I am NEVER without.

1. Sunscreen

Ideally, you should be wearing sunscreen everyday all year around. But this is especially true in the summer months. Sun exposure and more specifically sun damage, is the number one culprit to aging skin. So keep lathering babes!

I like to use a tinted sunscreen to go under my CC cream. The one I am using now blends to minimize the appearance of pores and wrinkles! I love it because it doesn’t feel oily or chalky like most sunscreens.

2. Moisturizer (yes even if you have oily skin)

If I had a penny for every time someone told me that they do not need moisturizer, or that they use their sunscreen as a moisturizer, I would be a very rich woman. Moisturizer is essential no matter your skin type! So if you have oily skin, you need to opt for a lightweight moisturizer rather than a heavy one.

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3. CC cream

Like I said, foundation is not on my every day wear list, especially in the summer. So I always have a light color correcting cream ready to go. This just helps correct discoloration and reduce the appearance of spots. CC cream is the best way to achieve a bare faced look without actually going bare faced. The coverage is pretty light, but it’s just enough to make a difference:

6 Step Skin Care Routine:

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It can get really confusing with the sheer number of skin care products that are out there, much less worrying about how to use them in the right order. Well one of my favorite routines to follow is the Korean beauty routine. For many years, Korean women (and men!) have been using this step by step process to maximize their skin care. Here is a quick run down of what each step is:

• Cleanse
• Exfoliate
• Treat
• Mask*
• Moisturize
• Sunscreen*

Step 1: Cleanse

Step one is common sense, start by washing your face. I’ve always advocated for using a gentle cleanser rather than a beaded or rough one. The reason for this is that if you use a wash that is too harsh on your skin you can cause micro tears.

This can lead to irritated pores, and breakouts. The one I am using now has little flakes in it for exfoliation, which made me a bit nervous, but I used it and it didn’t feel raw afterwards like the beads often do. I also applied very light pressure when washing. So if you are using a cleanser with beads or flakes, just be wary and try not to over do it.

I have been finding that this cleanser is really great for deep cleaning my face. But with most cleansers, I need to take my makeup off before I start to wash. This just allows for your cleanser to remove all remaining traces of makeup and dirt.

Step 2: Exfoliate

Okay, so for this step, you only want to be exfoliating your skin a couple times a week. I always opt for an enzymatic exfoliate. These usually come in the form of powders or wipes.

Enzymatic exfoliates are amazing for the skin because they eat away all the dead skin and dirt, but they don’t damage your face like beaded exfoliates do. It is much kinder to sensitive skin!

Step 3: Treat

After you exfoliate this is the part where you use serums, sprays or other treatments. Serums are great especially if you want to retain more moisture. Unlike moisturizers, serums penetrate the first layer of skin so you are treating skin cells beneath the first layer, which make for that healthy glow look.

Right now I am using the Honey Moon Glow serum from Farmacy, which isn’t a vegan brand. I really like this serum, but I will be trying out something new after the bottle runs out. In the mornings, I spray a little bit of the Herbivore rose hibiscus spray after I wash my face. Rose is an amazing ingredient if you have dry skin like me, it is very moisturizing.

Step 4: Mask

I love sheet masks. There is literally a sheet mask for every concern. I buy a big pack of masks with multiple types and do one every night before bed. This makes a huge difference in my face the following morning. My face looks fresh and plump after wards. Plus they are such a great way to unwind after a long day. You can buy a huge pack of them off of Amazon.

Step 5: Moisturize

Again, moisturizer is a skin care necessity! No matter your skin type, neglecting moisturizer can exacerbate your skin’s natural oil production. So if you have oily skin, skipping moisturizer actually causes your pores to secrete more oil to compensate.

I use two different moisturizers. I use a cream for the day which focuses on enhancing a dewy, radiant appearance. At night, I use a Jelly which you can use alone, or in addition to your moisturizer. This basically acts as an overnight mask that replenishes your skin’s natural moisture barrier while you sleep to help you wake up with a fresh dewy look.

Step 6: Put on sunscreen

In the morning before you put on your makeup, put on a nice sunscreen. This will help protect your skin from all that nasty sun damage we talked about earlier. You can wear makeup on top of it, or if you want a lighter coverage, you can opt for a CC cream.

Fun in the Sun= Lots of SPF

What is your skin care must have?

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Learn How I Am Meeting My Health and Fitness Goals in 30 Days

Hello Everyone!

Thank you as always for taking the time to visit my little blog here ❤

This is an exciting post for me, as I have been blogging for a little while now. The world of blogging has been an amazing opportunity with a strong and supportive community behind it. But I have wanted to branch out a bit more lately and expand my blog by involving more of a business aspect.

That being said, I am excited to formally announce that I have become an Independent Consultant with Arbonne! I am so excited for this business venture and the opportunity for personal growth and development. This means, I will be doing more posts that have Arbonne products featured and will be posting about it more frequently. It is very important to me that I am using and promoting brands and products that I trust and that I believe in.

What does that have to do with healthy living you may be asking? well Arbonne does a 30 days to healthy living challenge for preferred clients and consultants. To be honest, this program was a huge reason behind my personal involvement with Arbonne.

Upcoming 30 Days to Healthy Living Challenge:

If you all have seen on my social media, I have been posting a little tiny bit about my weight loss journey. One reason a lot of my older blog posts don’t have personal pictures is because I gained a lot of weight over the period I was writing my Dissertation and when I had to move back home. However, I have been working extremely hard to transition to a healthy lifestyle over the last few months.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz6FD1pgX6p/

I have also made great strides in my athletic abilities. I have been doing pole dance fitness for about a year and a half, and had really hit a wall in terms of what I could and could not do. It made me feel insecure and all my friends were advancing far more quickly than I was. Once I started working out to supplement my pole, I became better at the sport. It only took me a year and a half, but I can finally invert! whoot whoot! These small victories have motivated me to continue to push myself and become better.

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I know this challenge will allow me to push through the end to help meet my health and fitness goals. I have noticed a huge change in not only how I look and feel, but my overall confidence levels.

So for this 30 day challenge I have set some goals:

1. I will continue to change my body composition to be more muscular so that I can continue to advance in sports
2. I will learn to transition off of processed foods and refined sugars to support a healthier lifestyle
3. I will get settled into a routine with meal planning and fitness so that when I start school again, I can have a solid system of self-care in place.

My Steps to 30 Days:

I have started the challenge today, and will be participating until August 21st. I have a little over a month before I move back home. So, I will be starting this challenge in time to finish it before I move. I will be updating all you with my progress over social media so be sure to follow so you can be updated regularly!

I have embedded a video from Arbonne that goes over a bit of what the 30 Days to Health Challenge is, so if you have a moment, take a wee look 🙂

For 30 days here is what I will be eliminating:

• Animal Based Products 3-4 days a week
• Refined sugar – that means NO sweets, no Yogurt with added sweetener, tomato sauces with added sugar etc.
• Processed Foods -I will be sticking to whole foods, so no salt and vinegar crisps for me.
• Dairy -I will be switching to plant based diary products full time during the duration of this challenge. I have already eliminated pretty much all diary from my diet (Except cheese), but I will be stricter about it for these 30 days.

I will be replacing 1-2 meals a day with meal replacement shakes. Meal replacement shakes are different from basic protein shakes because they require an assortment of fresh fruits and veggies as well as healthy fats. This ensures that you are still getting the nutrients that your body needs in a day.

The other meal of my day will be proportioned as such:

Half the plate- fresh veggies

1/4 of the plate- lean protein

1/8 of the plate- Complex carbs (sweet potatoes, whole grain pasta, brown rice etc)

1/8 of the plate- Healthy Fats (Avocado, nuts etc)

If you want more information about the 30 days challenge, send me a wee message either via the contact form or my Facebook page

Make sure to check in on Instagram and Facebook over the next 30 days! I will be posting lots of recipes, tips and updates to social media. Additionally, I will post my results the day I leave for Scotland on the 22nd of August.

If you have any questions about the 30 days please feel free to drop me a comment or a message 🙂

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