An Effective 20-Minute Workout for Beginners

Here it is Day 3 of my quest for better health and fitness, and I hate to say it, but my motivation is not great today, but I'm determined and I know if I don't give up, I'll achieve my goals, and you will, too.

An Effective 20-Minute Workout for Beginners image courtesy of Pixabay

I'm still not ready to leap into an intense workout, plus before I started this, I committed to slide into it easy so I wouldn't burn out - so I decided what I need - for today - is an effective 20-minute workout for beginners.

I combined the short routines I did the first two days to create a fitness blast that delivered a mix of stretching, cardio, and dumbbell exercises.

Below is a little more detail on my 20-minute beginner's fitness blast, plus here is a link to another site called HealthLine in case you want to check out some routines that are 20-minutes and shorter.

An Effective Beginner 20-Minute Workout

I started by picking some music I wanted to listen to as my inspiration, then I started the stopwatch function in my phone.

• Warm up: I started with a slow 4-minute song for my warm up stretches. This was actually enough that my muscles were kind of burning, but breathing was still fairly easy. 
• Intervals: I moved into the next 12 minutes of the workout by picking up my dumbbells and doing a set of ten standing presses before moving into about a minute of freestyle dancing. 
• I kept alternating between dancing and sets of ten reps on my basic dumbbell routine, which includes bicep curls, shoulder shrugs, toe raises, squats, and tricep extensions. 
• During this part of the workout, I was a little more out of breath, but based on the Borg perceived exertion scale, I was about at a level 13, so still in the safe zone.
• And, my muscles burned even more, but not actually to the point of pain. 
• Cool down: I broke out another slow song for my cool down stretches for the last four minutes of my 20-minute workout, and now I'm here telling you that I feel better for making myself power through this workout even though I was feeling kind of blah and ambivalent when I started. 

So, when you feel feel blah and ambivalent, what do you do? Do you have a trick for powering through your lack of enthusiasm? If you hit 'the wall' and quit in the past - just shake it off and give it another try, because life is an ongoing project, and you'll feel better if you do this for yourself. I would love to hear what you think, so feel free to share your thoughts below.
Laure J