Trial and error is, like, so totally overrated, because, uh, there's like totally a gene for everything now. My brain hurts from typing that, but yes, there is apparently a gene for everything these days, including what sports we're most pre-disposed to.  

Here's the debate: little Suzie-Jo gets her mouth swabbed and the test says that she would be excellent at shot put. So Suzie-Jo's parents enlist the 5-year-old in shot put lessons, where she spends the rest of her formative years throwing heavy metal balls around until one day, long from now, she wins an Olympic Gold Medal and it was all worth it. Except maybe not. Maybe despite Suzie-Jo's natural aptitude for propelling heavy objects, she doesn't enjoy it. Perhaps she really loves running, or swimming or hates sports all together and would much rather spend her time reading comic books.

I've been mulling over in my brain the pros and cons that you mentioned in the comments from the last two fitness challenges, and it seems that the thing we've really all latched onto was the commitment and group initiative, plus the idea of a collective going through the same challenges together. We've mastered endurance with the Lazy Waister's Triathlon and now we've gotten a hold on the discipline of regularity with the 30-Minute Breast Cancer Awareness, and now we're getting into a challenging and busy time of the year. We've all got obligations, extra travel, socializing--plus the daily stuff in our own lives. I have a great idea for a new fitness challenge, but I'm worried that it will be too demanding trying to fit it into the busiest time of the year. Maybe not for you guys, but definitely for me! So, I propose that we do another 30-Minute Fitness Challenge: Holiday Edition.

Photo via Splash

Are you broke? I'm broke. Anne's broke. Kim's facing the brokety broke reality of unemployment. You all told us that you dream of a day when someone would pay you to work out, but why are you still paying someone to let you work out? If your budget is feeling the crunch, our old friend Stacy Berman will help you stop paying for that gym membership and find extra money that you didn't know you had.

Frugal Fitness Tip # 1: Strength in Numbers!
With so many consumers cutting back on spending, personal trainers and gyms are feeling the burn. Stacy recommends quitting your one-on-one training sessions in favor of a group discounted rate. "Many trainers will accept a larger group of people for a lower individual rate," says Stacy. "It's a great way to reduce spending on fitness but keep the motivation factor there."

Frugal Fitness Tip #2: The Cheaper the Meat, the Bigger Your Waist According to Stacy, many consumers will have to make sacrifices when it comes to consuming high-price items like meat. If you are a meat eater, Stacy warns you not to go overboard with cost-cutting. "Often the cheapest cuts of meat are also the cuts with the highest fat content. You may be saving a dollar or two, but it could add up your calorie content higher than it used to be," says Stacy. Instead, chose moderately priced lean cuts of meat and scale back on your side dishes. Stacy recommends whole grain, fiber-rich foods like rice and beans to compliment your meals.

Yesterday marked the final day of the Breast Cancer Awareness 30-Minute Fitness Challenge. Wow, those six weeks went incredibly fast! I have to say that overall, this was a little more demanding for me than the Lazy Waister's Triathlon Fitness challenge. The Lazy Waister allowed me to cram a lot of mileage in whenever I had a moment, but the 30-Minute Challenge required a daily adherence to an exercise regimen. However, because it wasn't distance-centric, it was a lot more flexible and allowed me to embrace my inner ADD and experiment with lots of different fitness options, like Tai Chi, yard work and club dancing. I didn't complete the challenge objective, which was to have 30 minutes of fitness at least 35 days during the time frame, but aside from the 13-day grief sabbatical, I missed only one day during business as usual, for a total of 28 days. I'm pretty sure that it's more days of actual exercise than I had done during the Lazy Waister Triathlon, but at the same time, I feel like I fudged a little bit, counting, for instance, a 35-minute trek across the Minneapolis airport, dragging my carry-on luggage as one day's exercise. Does that count? It should totally count, and yet, I feel like a cheater pants.

You all totally embraced the challenge, racking in 1,061 days where you engaged in at least 30 minutes of fitness or more. Any aerobic activity does a body good, so I hope that everyone is proud of their accomplishments during this challenge! That's a lot of days of fitness! And many of you went way above and beyond the 30-minute requirements, logging double, triple and quadruple the daily minimum. Rock on!

Oh, brrrrrrr. It's cold. Cold makes me want to hibernate, well not so much hibernate as sit on my couch drinking cocoa while watching Colin Firth movies--which, according to the last time I checked, does not actually qualify as exercise. Unfair but true. The sun raises later and sets earlier, which means I wake up and still want to be sleeping and leave work and want to go right back to the comforts of my PJs, but this winter I'm determined not to fall back into past winter's slothfulness. In an effort to motivate myself to get to the gym in the colder months ahead, I've made a list of all the great reasons to go to the gym. I'm sharing it with you because perhaps, just maybe, you share my winter-time exercise avoidance syndrome.

1. If you start now, you're going to look totally sexy by summer! While everyone else will be freaking out about bathing suit season, they'll ask you to keep your clothes on and contain your sexy self.

 2. It's winter, what else are you doing? Seriously now.

3. The gym is a great place to hide from your family. Added bonus, you don't have to wear Christmas-style sweaters a la Bridget Jones' Diary.

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, reveals how exceptionally successful people like The Beatles and Bill Gates, were able to become so wildly outstanding. He attributes their success largely to extraordinary circumstances, incredibly good fortune, and "the magic number of true expertise"--10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell says he achieved his 10,000 hours of practice during his ten years as a reporter for the Washington Post. The Beatles collected theirs in their early years by playing long sets in clubs in Hamburg, Germany, that led them to be more creative and confident as a band. By the time they achieved their first success in 1964, they'd already played a staggering 1,200 shows.

This 10,000 number got me thinking about the hours of my life spent doing different activities--sleeping, eating, reading, working. I shudder to think how much time I spend in front of a computer screen. I need a pie chart. I am serious about committing myself to a healthy living lifestyle, but when I tallied up the actual amount of hours I spent working out in October I dropped down on my knees and yelled a glorious "Noooooooo!" to the ceiling. I only spent 450 minutes at the gym for the entire month of October. I feel like I'm at the gym all the time, but apparently I can't even break the 8 hours/month mark. I suppose those early mornings when my gym comrade and I decided to skip our spin class in favor of sleep really added up (or, didn't add up, which is the problem).

It's already started: my annual holiday freakout. You see, my family is dysfunctional -- a whirling mire of passive-aggressive behavior, snide remarks and constant gossip. Scheduling anything with them is impossible, because nobody seems to be capable of arriving on time. If we are told to come at 2:00 p.m., we sit in an empty living room for at least an hour or more, waiting for people to show up, some of whom start arriving around 5:00 p.m. Then they get irritated when we have to leave for other plans at 6:00. How can you leave now? Aunt Drusilla isn't even here yet? And I'm the inconsiderate one? What's more, they ignore Esteban the entire time. He's been coming to holiday gatherings for the last 18 years, so you'd think they'd stop treating him like an outsider by now. If we skip a gathering, I'm branded a snob or "hoighty-toighty," (which is the worst sin imaginable to my grandmother). However, some years, my family has decided they want to have a gathering on Christmas Eve AS WELL as on Christmas Day, even though they know that Esteban's family has always gotten together on Christmas Eve without fail. Since I don't think it's fair to skip Esteban's family gathering just to attend my family's thing two nights in a row, I hear, "Oh, really, you'd rather go to Esteban's family thing? Oh. Oh, I see how it is. Well, I guess we'll have to see you whenever you can fit us in.  Riiiiiight.

Combine family drama with changing eating and sleeping patterns and a dollop of money worries, and it makes for a special brand of minty fresh misery. The thing is: all of this holiday stress starts to build up in your body. You start to feel tightness in your muscles from all the stress chemmies that are floating around in your body. Not good! Do not want. But what do you do?

I was so super-duper in love with Element Pilates: Weight Loss for Beginners, that I decided to return to the Element brand this week for their AM & PM Yoga for Beginners. I was not disappointed. 

Full disclaimer: Yoga is not my favorite form of exercise. Anything slow and methodical generally isn't my cup of tea, but I recognize that there are benefits from doing yoga and I have tried to make it a part of my quasi-well rounded exercise routine. So, when I say that I wasn't disappointed, I mean this video was good solid yoga.  That doesn't mean I want to marry it and have it's babies like I did with the Pilates DVD, but that may just be because yoga and I have a strictly working relationship--there's no love between us. 

I was really impressed with instructor, Elena Brower. At one point when she made a comment for a possible adjustment to the pose I was a little creeped out: how did she know I was doing that? She wasn't all hippy-dippy-breathy-yoga bunny either, which I appreciated. She was grounded, knew what she was talking about, and guided me through two half-hour long sessions that were grounded in real yoga series that I remember from my more committed days of Vinyasa practice.

Seriously, there is a such thing as yoga that hangs you from the ceiling like a sack of meat. Yoga which involves dangling. Yoga in which you climb into slings and try really hard not to fall on your head and die horribly of some kind of snapped spine complication. Anti-gravity yoga! Except that they don't actually turn off the gravity, and gravity can hurt. It's really real, anti-gravity yoga! And it is completely awesome.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be the person who named lipstick colors (Hot Flash of Madness; A Suffusion of Peonys). Now that I am a grown up, I want to be the person who comes up with the completely insane exercise class ideas for which people will give good money to attend and which will sweep the nation as the newest, greatest, batshit crazy fitness trend to come down the pike and which is so ridiculously awesome, you don't ever want to put down the glockenspiel.