My Exercise of Choice... + a bonus funny

As we all know, we all should exercise. Exercise is one of the main ingredients, if not THE main ingredient, in living a healthy life. AND, as we all know, exercise is tough. It involves pushing yourself past comfort to pain. Ever heard the saying no pain, no gain? It's true. Whether lifting weights, running, whatever kind of exercise you participate in, if you're not breathing heavy, feeling your muscles burning, or saying to yourself "I want to stop!" you're probably not gaining much at all. It's hard to hear, but true.

Honestly though, once you get past the point of hating it, and dreading your workouts, you will come to look forward to it. I promise this will happen! It may take awhile, we're all different. When I was doing P90X before our cruise last year, I was doing 5 videos a week. Each video is an hour long and there are NO BREAKS! You get maybe 5 minutes of breaks in the hour video. It's craziness! At first I was loving it, because I like to be pushed physically. I enjoy the extreme aching and soreness you get the 2 days following an intense workout. Then came the dreading it phase, where it was getting tiresome to fit in an hour workout 5 days a week while working 40 hours a week, and doing my treatments and such for an hour each day.  But alas, the days began coming where I had more energy and I was really looking forward to them! I was seeing results, felt incredible, and it was totally worth all the hard work! As Monica or my buddy Matthew. I gained over an inch in each arm, an inch and a half in each leg, and was looking sexy! lol! It will happen that you look forward to your workouts, and you will see results if you stick to it!

That actually was not at all what my post today is about though. That was a freebie! :) My post today is about my exercise of choice. Swimming! Or rather playing in the pool, and swimming! Jumping on a trampoline at a place like Skyzone (a warehouse with elevated trampolines joined together to form a basketball sized trampoline floor)! Our best friends have an outdoor pool, and Monica's grandma has an indoor pool with a slide and diving board. Talk about fun! And a good workout! Every time we "swim" it turns into some sort of jumping, diving, flipping, see who can grab and hang from the rafters by jumping off the diving board, human chicken, breath holding retrieving under water objects contest! haha! Which involves a lot of physical exertion and gets the body MOVING! I cough like a banshee every time.

In fact, my buddy made a very astute observation this year. We were at his house swimming (the one with the outdoor pool), and he says "You seem to cough a lot anytime you're in the pool. You cough, but never as much as when you get in the water." He's right! Monica and my buddy's wife noticed too. For some reason simply being in the water causes me to cough a lot. And not just cough a lot, but produce a lot of sputum. In fact, one night I coughed up 2 mucus plugs while we were swimming! This is now my exercise of choice! It's fun, and it works! Now just have to convince Monica to move somewhere tropical with a pool! :)

P.S. If you want a really good workout, chop down a tree! My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law's fiance and I chopped one down Sunday and I'm sore all over! You don't realize all the various muscle groups you use when swinging an axe! Here's a few videos for you to enjoy! We have kinda made it a tradition on special occasions or just because, to chop down dead trees in my in-laws backyard!