Is it raining? Nope, just sweat.

TGIF! Or, like Katy Perry likes to chant, T - G - I - F, T - G - I - F! [love that song, can't hide it]. I hope everyone had a wonderful week and is ready for an action packed, beach filled, active weekend. Forecast points to a pretty perfect weekend so live it up. My good friend from college will be in town all the way from Australia so I look forward to some quality social time with my besties. Little sun, little beach, little exercise, little beverage. Life is good.

Since I have only been making it to the gym 3 or 4 days a week for the past couple of weeks, I have really focused on getting in good lifts. When it comes down to it, cardio makes you feel great but it has no sustainable effect on muscle growth and metabolism boosting. On the days I lift lower body, I have no problem getting a sweat going by the second set of whatever I'm doing. On upper body days...it may or may not happen. There is nothing worse than leaving the gym without being super sweaty. I would feel like a failure. Solution? I always make sure to do like 15 mins of cardio to get a good sweat going before I start my lifting routine.

As the queen of efficiency, the obvious answer to my cardio warmup is to choose the exercise that makes you the sweatiest the fastest. There is one, and only one, answer: the stairmaster. 10 minutes on that baby and I'm fully 'glistening' [because that is what girls do, right?]. This brings me to Tuesday evening. I was about to get my lift on, and hopped on the stairmaster to warm up. Usually I pick a program but I decided to just do 'quick start' to get the party started. The quick start program automatically sets you up for a 20 minute workout, so I got all competitive with myself and wanted to do the whole 20 minutes, increasing speed every couple of minutes. Who competes with themselves on the stairmaster? As a warmup? I'm weird. 

Regardless, 20 minutes later I was panting and INCREDIBLY sweaty. Record setting I'm pretty sure. I got off the machine and made my way to the weights area and said hi to one of the trainers who was using a bench next to me. He looks at me and goes, completely seriously, "ooo did it start pouring outside?". My response: "Uh no. I was on the stairmaster." He gave me a pretty serious look, chuckled, and just turned around. I'm almost impressed with myself that someone assumed I was caught in a downpour rain storm. New high. Sweat all your toxins away this weekend - it does the body good!