Building a smaller waist

Yo, yo, yo, friends! It's Tuesday, yay!

Yesterday was damn near the most productive day of my life. I hit 27,333 steps yesterday!

I woke up at the lovely hour of 4:30 with Vic, like always, and once he was out the door I was on my treadmill and I knocked out 5 miles to get the day going. Ryker scared the shit out of me by sneaking up behind me, and the day was off and running. We had a painter come out and do some touchups, and luckily he came during the first thirty minutes of the four hour window they gave us, so we got to the gym nice and early after taking the dogs on their morning walk. 

Paul and I switched gears to a powerlifting training plan and it has been nothing short of amazing. I thrive on goals and checking boxes (which is why I thought sales would be cool, I was wrong, haha), and so I do better with his training plans than just going in to the gym and auto-regulating my workout. There are days for auto-regulation, but I enjoy his plans much more! Yesterday I had 3 sets of 10 for squat (140lbs), bench (75lbs) and deadlift (165lbs). I'm taking more time to warm up for each lift with foam rolling and stretching and slowly working up to the working set weight and I've noticed a HUGE difference in my performance! I'm going to try and post more training videos to my IG when I can, so come join the party over there!

We stopped off at Wal-Mart, or the Sunshine Store, as Ryker likes to call it, for pumpkin biscuit ingredients. It may have taken four batches, but I adjusted the recipe I found to make my own recipe and they turned out AMAZING. Vic is having a little awards event at work today and that was what I volunteered for the spread. I also made pumpkin butter which turned out super tasty, but looked like brains in the mason jar. Oh well. I'll post the biscuit recipe later this week!

Once the kids were down, I actually got off my lazy butt, paused Grace and Frankie and kept my word to follow along with the Clean Mama's schedule for easy house cleaning. Go follow her on IG! She posts daily tasks and it really does help. This week, my goal is to stay on schedule and hopefully it will help my at home tasks not get to the "Jesus, why is there so much to do?!" point. I scrubbed and wiped down all three bathrooms and felt super accomplished, and the smell of Comet also made me feel like I have almost completed my transformation into my Mother. Shout out to Momma and her incessant cleaning.

I hit my macros on point, but I also added in an untracked glass of red while baking because guys...baking biscuits is fucking stressful! I'm a cook, where I can fudge stuff and make it up as I go, baking is so damn specific and precise and luckily, I'm finding my groove with more and more practice. I'm also working on not being such a food weirdo, haha, so of course I had to take a sample bite of each batch of biscuits. I can't tell you how much baking I did last year where I didn't try anything because of macros! Ugh.

I started this post with a point in mind and then got away from myself. I was pretty stoked on how I looked and felt this morning and took a quick Count Mickula selfie in my kitchen and was pleasantly surprised by my lats. That led me to want to share how you can BUILD a smaller waist, by working on your back! I love training my back because it makes me feel so strong, and I have just a few absolute favorites that I love to use. The idea here is that by building the muscles in your back (which are super sexy and really show off that you're a badass in the gym), you create the illusion of a smaller waist because you create that taper.

Favorite back exercises:
Kneeling single arm cable pulldown
V-Bar pulldown
Seated cable row
Underhand bent over barbell row

For the first two, I suggest going light and high rep until you really learn how to get that mind muscle connection, sometimes I like to place my non-working hand on my working lat to ensure I'm feeling it properly. The right muscle activation is way better than working heavy! Go with a weight that is challenging but allows you to get to 10-12 reps for the cable row, keep that back straight and doing roll your shoulders forward all crazy. For the bent rows, keep that low back in check and always go for form over heavy weight. I track all of my workouts in BodySpace, an app from Bodybuilding.com and they have awesome videos and tips for every exercise!

From there, I'll stop blabbing and get my day started! Happy Tuesday, friends, I'll talk to you soon!