Fine-tune Your Body

photo credit: mikebaird

After all that scrumptious food from the last foodie post, we need to think about burning off all the calories. Especially if like me you feel virtuous when you don’t order a desert for yourself, only to then devour most of your husband’s crème brûlée.

Using a gym is the most common way to exercise, but for me it gets boring after the first month of joining somewhere new.

To save…

The savers option to avoid boredom is signing up to a DVD subscription site and hire fitness DVDs as well as feature films.

I know I’ve wasted money on buying a fitness DVD in January only to use it a few times before becoming bored of it. This way you can pick one of the many hundreds of fitness DVDs every few days and try out something new. Plus you get to exercise from the comfort of you own home.

The rental packages vary from renting 1 DVD per month, to hiring an unlimited amount of DVDs per month with up to 3 DVDs at a time. Here are the costs I found when comparing packages with unlimited DVDs with up to 3 at a time:

PostaDVD.com £13.75/mth DVDs & games
Tesco £14.97 - with games £17.97
Cinema Paradiso £14.99/mth
Blockbuster £14.99/mth
Outnow £14.99/mth - offering the best trial of 3 mths and paying for only 1 mth (2 DVDs at a time only). Use code ON341FT.
Lovefilm £15.99/mth
EasyCinema £19.90/mth (up to 10 DVDs a month).

To splurge…

If you feel like splurging then one way is to sign up with a qualified personal trainer. Make sure that they have more to offer than just running with you round the block or teaching you sit ups on a swiss ball. There are plenty of trainers out there that offer kick boxing, yoga, tennis and more. There is no quicker way to gain confidence and knowledge in a new skill than one to one training.

Another splurge which I find that motivates me is a heart rate monitor, especially when running on a cold dark morning. My current one tells me the distance I’ve run and the calories I’ve burnt.

The Polar FT80 with G1 includes a GPS sensor tells you the speed and distance travelled, also useful if you get lost! It’ll help build you a training programme and give you weekly training targets to aim for.

Another option is the Gamin Forerunner 405 also with GPS which transmits data back to your computer. You can send your favourite route to a friend for them to try or, for the more competitive out there, you can try and beat the time that your friend completed the same route in.

Now all I’ve got to do is be good until a visit from Santa