Review of Beachbody Hammer and Chisel: ISO Speed Hammer

I started Hammer and Chisel back in December when it first came out, but then I got sick and never went back to it. I'm pretty sure it's my first failed Beachbody experience. I didn't go back to it because I just wasn't in love with it. I'm not a huge fan of total body workouts and this was a total body workout every day. I also wasn't very good at a lot of the moves. There was a lot of balancing stuff in it and I have horrible balance. With all of that said, why am I writing a review of ISO Speed Hammer again? I did the workout back on December 19, 2015 when I did it for the first time. Well, part of the Wild Movement is doing strength training and he suggests total body workouts. That means, I'll be doing some Total Body workouts! Oh joy. Last week, I did Slim in 6 Start it Up. I had planned on doing the second one in the series this week, but hubby actually was willing to go for a walk on Monday so we dd that. I woke up late this morning and he wasn't interested in going for a walk because he didn't want to feel rushed. That left me with either going for a short walk alone, doing strength training, doing nothing or doing the 7 Minute HIIT from The Wild Diet book. I chose to do strength training because I wasn't in the mood for jumping jacks and more importantly, I wasn't in the mood for the coughing that comes with the jumping jacks. I couldn't do the second Slim in 6 workout because I didn't have enough time. That left me with picking something from Hammer and Chisel. I picked ISO Speed Hammer because it was under 30 minutes!

You can see a list of all the moves on my first post about this workout. I didn't read the post before doing the workout and I couldn't remember anything about it. There were 10 moves. We did the first move slow for 10 reps and then fast for 10 reps. Then we moved to the next one. It was nice not having to repeat any moves. I didn't realize it was going to be like that though. I dreaded going back to the lunges again. At some point, I realized we weren't going to repeat the moves and I was much happier. This workout would have gone better today if I hadn't been in such a crappy mood when I started it. I hate waking up late and I really just wanted to go for a nice easy walk. I wasn't in the mood for squats and lunges.I did it though. I wasn't able to do some of the moves as fast as they did. I should have paused the workout and did all of the reps, but I didn't. I just did them until they finished them. I wasn't even counting because my mind was just not into it. 

Once I was done with the workout, I was in a better mood. That hasn't happened before. I was happy that I had done it, but I didn't feel like I had done a total body workout. My hamstrings kind of felt it, but the rest of me didn't really feel like I had worked out. When I was doing each move, the fast reps were challenging and I really felt the last few reps, but overall, I didn't feel too terribly worked over. It was under 30 minutes though so that could be part of it. We only did about one move per body part other than legs. We did deadlifts, lunges and two types of squats. I didn't use weights during the Pistol Squats. Instead, I put my hand on the wall to work on my balance. I just tried to do deeper squats without the weights. My form was still horrible though. 

I'm not sure what else to say. I'll write more about my Wild Movement in another post. I'm less inspired to write when I'm not losing weight. I feel like such a failure with this weight loss stuff. After the drop of 7 pounds the first week, I had high hope for this plan, but my second week showed no losses and my third week has me actually gaining weight. I'm doing well with my nutrition in terms of being low carb, but I am eating more cheese than I probably should be eating. I'm sleeping like crap though due to stress. Maybe I should start up another Beachbody program, but I can't really do that if I'm going to be walking with hubby. ugh I hate decisions.

Okay so I wrote this post like two weeks ago and never actually posted it. I'm such a dork. I'm sure I had plans of putting more stuff in here, but for now this is all you get since it's been too long for me to pick up where i left off on here. 

Wild Movement

We watched the show My Diet is Better Than Yours and my husband discovered the Wild Diet. I had heard about it and it's something we've been trying to do anyway. Last year we bought a side of beef that was raised locally and we've been paying more attention to what types of eggs we buy. We're still working on finding an affordable source of local pasture raised pork. We have found a place to get chickens, but that's still a couple months away. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. I'll talk more about the diet part of this once I get through the book and get better about following the plan. Right now, I'm eating as much organic vegetable matter as I can and we've got out pretty much all processed foods. He's even kicked his soda habit. Although the reasons for that are different.

There's a chapter on exercise in the book. I was really intrigued by Kurt Morgan losing 85 pounds during the 14 weeks the show was being filmed. It appeared that he wasn't doing much exercise and he still lost a lot of weight. I go through periods of time where I think I'm over exercising, but then how could that even be possible if people on The Biggest Loser seem to be working out like eight hours a day. How could my 45 minutes to an hour possibly be over exercising. I have no proof that it is or isn't, but what I know is that I lost 60 pounds in my first year of trying to lose weight and then I gained 20 during Body Beast because I couldn't get my nutrition under control. Then I lost 10. Then I lost five more, but gained it back and have been gaining and losing those five pounds for months. It has to stop. Thinking back over that time frame, I was working out less and less intensely while losing those initial 60 pounds. My nutrition wasn't perfect either. It's not perfect now that's for sure, but back in the beginning of this, I was baby stepping my way to better nutrition. I was transitioning from Pop Tarts for breakfast, now I'm drinking Shakeology. Breakfast was my first change way back when, but I've pretty much transitioned all of my meals to healthy options. My snacks are a lot better too. I'm still working on cutting out the cheating during the weekends, but now that hubby is off sugar, I think that will help me out. 

So bottom line, I'm eating better and I'm working out harder than I did in the beginning, so why am I not losing weight? Maybe I really am working out too much. My body takes longer than the average person to heal cuts and bruises, so why would I think my muscles could magically recover at the same rate as the average human while doing intense programs like 21 Day Fix Extreme and Hammer & Chisel. I'm going to give The Wild Movement plan some time and see how it goes. This works out good for me because hubby wanted to start walking before work and I was all bummed because I wasn't sure how I could fit in doing that and doing another Beachbody program at the same time. I'm going to take a break from Beachbody "programs" for the moment and work on Wild Movement. That doesn't mean I'm trashing on Beachbody or that I won't be doing any Beachbody workouts. Part of Wild Movement is strength training and I will be using Beachbody for that. 

The Plan

So he says that you should do strength training once a week, a HIIT workout once a week, break a sweat every day, walk often and take a rest day every week.

Monday, I did a strength training workout with 10 Minute Trainer. It wasn't a total body workout like he suggests, but it was what I had left of 10 Minute Trainer, so it's what I did. 

Tuesday, hubby and I were planning on going for a walk, but his knee hurt, so we didn't. I procrastinated for a very long time and ran out of time for a workout. I decided to do The 7-Minute Wile Interval Workout that's described in the book. You've got a one minute warm up, 10 intervals of work and rest and a one minute cool down. He suggests finding a hill and you run up it for 20 seconds and then rest for 10. You do 10 rounds like that over 5 minutes. He says that you can do other things as long as you go all out for 20 seconds. He suggest things like jumping rope, jumping jacks and burpees. I chose to do jumping jacks until I couldn't do them anymore because my calves were killing me. At that point, I switched to running in place. I went back to jumping jacks for the last round. I did T- Rex arms during my jumping jacks and I heard Autumn Calabrese in my head yelling at me about them. I didn't care though! 

Okay, so 20 seconds of work doesn't sound like much, but when you only get 10 seconds of rest in between, those 20 seconds end up getting longer and longer and longer! My coughing certainly acted up during this little endeavor, but it was only 7 minutes, so I could get through it. I got the GymBoss app on my phone. I loved it! 

So he says that you should feel pretty worn out at the end of the workout. I certainly did! Not only that, but he next day, my calves, abs and middle delts were killing me! I could barely lift my arms up, stairs were torture for me and couching was hell! I'm writing this on Friday morning and I can still feel it in my calves and my abs! 

Here are my Polar M400 screen shots from my 7 Minute HIIT workout. You can see where I switched from Jumping Jacks to Running in place. Since the intervals were so short, it's not a very impressive heart rate chart, but you can see the ups and downs of the work and rest. 

Wednesday and Thursday, I walked by myself because hubby's knee was still bothering him. I walked for about 45 minutes on each day. It was just over 2.5 miles each day. Friday turned into my rest day. I was tired and just didn't feel like getting out of bed, so I just laid there. 

Wednesday's screen shots. 

Thursday's screen shot. I didn't show the heart rate on this one for Thursday because it was way out of whack. I thought I was over all of this wackiness, but I was wrong. 

I haven't been at this for a full week, so it's a bit too soon to talk about results, but I will say that I dropped back to 263. I was up around 267 earlier in the week, but part of that was some retained water. I had a lot of salt this past weekend and a couple other reasons for retained water. At this point, I think I've got a little extra water in there because my calves and abs are still sore. I usually retain water as long as I've got muscle soreness going on. I'm hoping that I'll be down another pound or so within a couple days. I'll don't think I'm going to do daily posts about my workouts while I'm doing this program since it's mainly just walking, but I'll probably do weekly posts. I'll see how I feel. If I'm not doing daily posts about my workouts, I'll have time to write about something other than just the workouts. I want to tell you all about my vacuum sealer, my blender and so much more stuff!