How To Get Ripped Abs Challenge – Day 5

The first thing I noticed getting out of bed today was that my hamstrings were incredibly sore. The How to Get Ripped Abs program makes sure you are getting plenty of hamstring and glute work. These workouts are hitting me in ways I’m not used to and that’s a good thing. I really need to make sure I’m doing the stretching exercises post workout for recovery. The stretching is really important overall promoting overall health and recovery post workout. It was a fairly typical day of eating and fairly easy since everything was already pre cooked and ready to eat. I mixed things up a bit with the chicken, brown rice, and beans though. I cut the chicken into cubes and added it into a ziplock bag along with the brown rice and beans. I then added about 3 tablespoons of Frank’s Red Hot Buffalo sauce and shook them up in the bag. I love buffalo chicken and this ended up making a nice buffalo chicken rice and black bean casserole. I ate it with a side of baby carrots. Some crumbled blue cheese would have been nice on top but I didn’t have any (and maybe that’s a good thing because I would have used it instead of my 4 fish oil caps that I took instead). There are so many ways to prepare chicken, rice, and beans. I think I’ll write a recipe for this and include options for a whole wheat low carb wrap so that you can make it into a burrito. Simple to make but very nutritious packed with protein. The brown rice and black beans compliment each other nicely by creating a complete protein.

It was time to workout again and I was doing workout A. It was going to be quicker this time since I was familiar with the exercises and had picked weights from Monday when I did this routine the first time. This time through I could just focus on improving the amount of reps I did with each weight and really push myself. This How to Get Ripped Abs workout once again proved it could kick my butt. The exercises on the ball to work abs are something I’ve never done before and I can still only do around 6-7 reps. The goal is to get up to 12-15. They take so much stability that nearly every muscle in your body is holding you up on the ball. The ball pike for abs is the toughest for me right now. You get yourself in push up position and put your feet up on top of a ball. You slide the ball towards your body starting with your feet which creates a crunch in the lower abs. You do this until your body is in an A frame. So while doing this you are trying to keep your legs straight because they want to roll left and right off of the ball and you are stabilizing your upper body in the air in push up position. While doing this I literally have sweet dripping onto the floor. At the end of the workout my shirt was completely soaked through like someone sprayed me with a hose. I never sweet nearly this much in a workout but these are so taxing that the body goes into overdrive. The workout program is called Meltdown and the body is just trying to cool itself off.

It’s Friday night so I treated myself with a different spin on my dinner. I made a huge buffalo chicken salad and used low fat blue cheese. I used a bit extra blue cheese but am not worried about that because I burned so many calories during the workout that I deserve a little something I haven’t had all week. I also had a small glass of red wine. The fatigue from the first 5 days is starting to catch up with me though so tonight will be the earliest I go to bed all week. Tomorrow is a cardio day and then Sunday I’ll finally get a much needed day of rest from training.