About me and the challenge...

I'm a British blogger and I've recently become interested in adopting a different approach to my fitness, because as a 40+ injured recent mother of one, there is only so much time I can dedicate to exercise. Dieting and I don't get on (too hungry on 1200 calories, which is the standard for most diet programmes) and besides, being a toddler wrangler with a full-time job and shift working husband, I don't always get all the rest I need, which leads me to eating and drinking the wrong stuff.

To this end, I've been reading the blogs of two women in particular, Amber Rogers at Go Kaleo and Nia Shanks at www.niashanks.com who advocate rejecting the rather simplistic "Eat Less, Move More" perspective on fitness, with the focus being on eating better rather than just less and strength training for general awesomeness. This is also coupled with a move away from the destructive practice of just focussing on the numbers of calories you consume or burn and your weight. It's easy to lose your focus on health when the numbers on the scales don't do what you want them to do after weeks of "being good" and that's the situation I currently find myself in.

Therefore I'm basing my training on Nia Shanks Beautiful Badass Mini Course, (Click on the link to sign up - you'll get it free) but it won't be a direct copy because I've got a fairly nasty lower back injury that needs careful handling. The Deadlift is not my friend, for example. I'm using Nia's course with her blessing, as long as give credit where appropriate. This makes me very happy :)

I also won't always be mentioning numbers of reps or giving out specific sets of exercises, it'll more be refection on how I find doing certain things, am I getting stronger, will my arms give out, what the recovery is like, that sort of thing. Plus the bare bones of what I'm doing will get a little yawnsome after a while.

Like a lot of women, I've been doing a lot of cardio without any real results to show for it for years (though my legs are in good nick), and I want that situation to change. Coupled with the fact that I got the skiing bug at 39, I would like to be able to do that for as long as possible and you need more than aerobic fitness to be able to achieve that.

So let the challenge commence!

This will run from 9th July to 9th September 2013. (Slightly more than 8 weeks, but who's counting?)