Take Live Well 360's December Fitness Challenge

It’s already December, which means the holidays are here, and we are spending less time working out and more time with family and friends. December is the hardest month to stay on track with our workouts. So we have a great challenge for this month to stay back on track around the holidays. We are super excited for our fitness challenge of the month! Fitness should be all year round, especially around the holidays when we start to forget about our fitness goals. We have a great fitness challenge for you that you can try this month and even use all year round. Guess what we have for you this month?! It’s another Fitness Challenge!! Our fitness challenge of the month is all about working on cardio! Yes, that’s right we said cardio! Cardio is great to work on heart rate, endurance, and core activation. Throughout all our challenges we focused on flexibility, and strength but we want to take what we learned in those challenges and combine it to focus on cardio and explain why cardio is so important for all around movement! We will show you how to warm up your body, add cardio in fun, different ways and advance the movement with intervals by the end of this challenge! This fitness challenge will happen over four weeks, and each week we will work on advancing our cardiovascular exercises. We want to work through dynamic warm-ups, foam rolling and then the actual cardiovascular movement! All of these things will lead to a stronger heart, and core activation. And the fun part: As you finish each day of this challenge you will become stronger and have better core activation, and endurance! These exercises will help with all your workouts and build strength! Now let’s get started with our cardio challenge this December!

Dynamic Warm Up

The warm-up is one of the most important parts of a workout. It gets your body warmed up and ready to move in a safe way! Our warm-up for this challenge is fun and works on flexibility! Let’s get started start with week 1:

WEEK 1

Dynamic Warm up for Week 1 will include: Foam Rolling- Hamstrings and lower body. Foam rolling focusing on hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. Foam Rolling: Making sure to foam roll your entire lower body. We start with hamstrings, then quads, glutes, and calves. Cardiovascular Exercises: Treadmill: We are starting our first week off with the treadmill! Which is a great piece of equipment to use for your first week of your challenge!! The treadmill is great because you can start out walking or running depending on your level of endurance and how comfortable you feel. Let’s start with 2 sets of 10 rounds Each round will consist of incline at level 2 at a speed of 5

WEEK 2

Dynamic Warm up for Week 2 will include: Foam Rolling- Hamstrings and lower body. Foam rolling focusing on hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. Foam Rolling: Making sure to foam roll your entire lower body. We start with hamstrings, then quads, glutes, and calves. Cardiovascular Exercises: Stairmaster: For week 2 we want to start to increase the challenge and build endurance. So for that we will start the Stairmaster and this challenge will be longer and harder. For this, we will start with an 8-minute warm-up at any speed on the Stairmaster. 6 rounds of 5 minutes on and 2 minutes off in between at a speed of 5 Cool down: 5 minutes at a level 2

WEEK 3

Dynamic Warm up for Week 3 will include: Foam Rolling- Hamstrings and lower body. Foam rolling focusing on hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. Foam Rolling: Making sure to foam roll your entire lower body. We start with hamstrings, then quads, glutes, and calves. Cardiovascular Exercises: Treadmill: We are back to the treadmill this time notching it up just a little! We are going to increase our incline and our speed. Warm up: 8 minutes at speed 3 10 rounds of 2 minutes on and 1 minute off at speed 5 incline 6% Cool down: 5 minutes at speed 2

WEEK 4

Dynamic Warm up for Week 4 will include: Foam Rolling- Hamstrings and lower body. Foam rolling focusing on hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. Foam Rolling: Making sure to foam roll your entire lower body. We start with hamstrings, then quads, glutes, and calves. Cardiovascular Exercises: Stairmaster: For the Stairmaster this week let’s try changing up the speed and intervals! We are going to be increasing the speed and lowering the time off in between reps. Warm up: 8 minutes at speed 3 10 rounds of 3 minutes on and 1 minute off at speed 6-8(whatever is comfortable for you) Cool down: 5 minutes at speed 2 (* * *)

And that's it!

These workouts are super fun but challenging! CONGRATS YOU FINISHED YOUR December CHALLENGE!! You should be stronger and overall more comfortable with doing cardio. You should be so proud of yourself!! You got through four weeks of consistent cardio workouts and that’s not easy!! That means you are stronger and able to complete any cardiovascular movement no problem! Just because this challenge is over, doesn’t mean your fitness journey should stop here! Continue the December challenge into the next month; don’t stop working on cardio just because the month is over! Keep working on cardio even try adding it every time you workout. Take advantage of your new knowledge on cardio and keep doing it every day!

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