After eight weeks, Round 3 of Tina’s Best Body Bootcamp has come to a close.

Sort of.

My schedule and Best Body Bootcamp’s schedule just did not line up well this week. I had Christmas shopping and a meeting that took up all of my usual workout time on Wednesday, and I chose to take a rest day on Friday in light of the 5K I’m running this morning. Normally, I’d just skip the scheduled workouts and move on to the next, but since this was the last week of Bootcamp, I decided to instead do workouts when I had time. So, for example, I did Wednesday’s workout on Thursday, and I’m doing Thursday’s cardio workout on Sunday (in the form of hip hop, of course 🙂 ). Friday’s workout will probably happen next Monday.

Out of all of the phases in this round of workout, I think this one was the best. Yeah, the tabatas were tough, but they kept things interesting and really forced me to push myself. I never thought I’d be one to jump on the HIIT train (I prefer my cardio to be of the slow and steady sort), but I enjoyed working up a sweat on the sprint cardio routines we had in this phase.

Signing up for Best Body Bootcamp was one of the better fitness decisions I’ve made in some time. I’ve followed lots of training plans before–a 5K plan, a 10K plan, a half marathon plan–and I always found myself burnt out of training by the end, especially with my half marathon. I was tired of doing the same thing more or less three or four times per week. I never felt burnt out from Bootcamp. We repeated workouts twice in two weeks (and often, they weren’t identical repeats: usually it involved the same exercise, but a different number of reps), and that kept things fresh and interesting. You didn’t have a chance to get bored because things kept changing.

As far as body changes go, I noticed in the past week or so that my arms have a lot more tone than they had when I started (though, interestingly enough, they are still quite incapable of doing tricep extensions…oof). If I’m being completely honest, I did expect to see some more changes in my appearance than I have, but I don’t think it’d be fair of me to blame that on Bootcamp. I’ll be the first to admit that I did not do well on my goal of making smart food choices (I’m looking at you, three large Tupperware containers full of addictive cookie goodness…) and I’m sure sitting at my desk at work all day in place of walking around a college campus all day hasn’t done me a lot of favors in that department, either. Regardless, I do know that I’ve gained muscle, and that makes me quite happy 🙂

Best Body Bootcamp was, without question, worth every single penny of the $25 cost. I’d recommend it to anyone. I’m so glad I was able to participate this round, and I’ve already signed up for Round 4 (and you can, too!). In the mean time, I plan on going back through some of the workouts from earlier phases…gotta see if those workouts still kick my butt the way they used to 😉