I just finished a wonderful workout. It’s great to get my groove back and really get into my workouts again. For a while there I was struggling, especially with cardio.

I’ll start by telling you about yesterday’s lower body workout. I did Cathe Friedrich’s Pyramid Lower Body, which I hadn’t done in ages. It’s based on a pyramid weight system (hence the name). You start with 12 reps at your lightest weight, then go to your middle weight for 10 reps, and then do 8 reps at the heaviest weight. Then you work back down, 10 more at the middle weight, and 12 at your lightest weight again. It means a lot of weight changes, so it helps to have an easy-to-change barbell. It took forever with my previous barbell because I actually had to use pliers to loosen the bolts on that thing for every change. Even with my newer barbell I still wasn’t as fast as Cathe for most of the weight changes, so I had to pause a lot. One of my friends said she has two barbells so she would keep them loaded with the light and middle weight and only have to change for the heavy weight. I might try that next time since I still have the old barbell in the basement.

Anyway, it’s a tough workout with lots of weight changes but very straightforward traditional lower body work. Then she gets out a stability ball and does some floor work. These were pretty tough for me; I think part of the problem was I was using my new larger stability ball. When I had a foot or two up on top of the ball, it seemed awful high up there and hard to manage. I might have to bring the smaller one out next time and try it. Today I’m sore mostly in my hamstrings and calves, which made it hard to start today’s step workout!

Today’s workout was Tap-Less and Sweat More with Deirdre Morris. It’s a CIA workout from their last release, which I preordered and received ages ago. I don’t know why I hadn’t tried it out yet, except maybe that I have gotten so many great workouts to try in the last few months. It’s also hard for me to start a new step instructor because I am usually so happy with just Cathe Friedrich and Amy Bento. I came so close to just putting this one up for sale since I hadn’t used it, but I decided to give it a try first. I’m glad I did.

This was a fabulously fun and complex step workout with really fun pumping music. If you don’t like complex step, it’s probably not for you, and if I hadn’t done lots of Amy Bento step before I might have been completely lost. However, I found that complex as it was I kept going. I thought maybe I would just do one or two combos to try to learn them and then put in a familiar DVD to finish the rest of my workout. Instead I ended up going straight through the first 6 combos. On the 7th combo I finally got brain fatigue and put in Amy’s Advanced Step Challenge II to do the first couple combos of that one. Then I put Deirdre’s workout back in for the cool down and stretch (didn’t do the abs section yet). I was so surprised that I was able to plug right on through 6 complex combos, but that’s how fun it was. She doesn’t let up (I usually didn’t even know we’d moved on to a new combo) but even when I was stumbling along I was able to get back to where she was quickly enough. My main problem was that her terminology was a little different than what I know. For instance, what Amy or Cathe would call a “knee side to side” Deirdre called a “travel knee”. I think I’ve heard that term before from some other instructor, but it had been awhile. Fortunately that’s a really easy move anyway so I caught on quickly. Another good thing about this workout is Deirdre herself. She was straightforward and smiling and not at all irritating. Her voice was pleasant and not grating like some instructors. Her cueing was great as well.

I hope that Deirdre makes more step workouts and I would only request that she add an instructional section for some of the more crazy moves. That wouldn’t be a deal breaker, though. If and when she makes more I’ll be signing up to try them out immediately.

Edited to add: Don’t forget to check out the yoga giveaway.