Fitness Goals Update: October

I skipped my goals update last month, but I have been keeping up with working out pretty well. I'm trying to work out 5 or 6 days a week rather than the paltry 2 or 3 I had been managing. This doesn't mean that I work out at Jazzercise each day (necessarily) but that I'm doing something fitness related most days.

One thing that has made working out a little more intruiging is my recent purchase of a heart rate monitor watch. (I found mine new on Ebay.) The watch communicates with a sensor I wear around my ribcage and records my heartbeats per minute. Combined with data I've entered about my age/weight, it calculates how many calories I burn while working out. It also give me an idea of how much time I was working out in the Fitness Zone (higher than 70% of max BPM) versus the Fat Burn Zone (approx. 50-70% of max BPM).

I learned pretty quickly that I don't burn much fat at Jazzercise--it's an intense workout where I spend the vast majority of time in the fitness zone. If I'm not late for class (argh!) I tend to burn 450-500 calories per session.

As a result of these findings, I've been trying to add more fat-burning activities into the mix (walking and low-impact dance workouts on streaming Netflix.) I've thought about wearing the monitor while doing intense housework, just to find out what I'm burning, but I haven't actually hooked up the monitor to find out yet.

Anyway. I'm still working towards my fitness goal for the year, and there is a chance I will make it, although I'll have to focus and work hard.

Total for 2010 as of October 31: 120 classes

This means that I have two months to attend 30 classes, which breaks down to 15 classes per month. This is doable, but I'd hoped to be more ahead by this point, as there are exactly 15 days in November when I expect to have time to attend class. I see some early morning workouts in my future!