This week, I have some new products to introduce! Plus, the beginning of my journey into a 5-day lifting routine.

RECIPES AVAILABLE HERE (UPDATED FOR WEEK OF June 16)

Customizable DAOFitlife Meal Plan and Grocery List Links– Week 15

• Customizable DAOFitlife Meal Plan and Grocery List Template Google Sheet 
• Downloadable DAOFitlife Meal Plan and Grocery List Template Excel Document
• Printable DAOFitlife Meal Plan and Grocery List Template PDF

DAOFitlife Exercise Plan – Week 15

Exercise Template Links

• Customizable DAOFitLife Exercise Plan Google Sheet Template 
• Downloadable DAOFitLife Exercise Plan Excel Document
• Printable DAOFitlife Exercise Plan PDF

Meal plan – nut butter crepes and healthy salad dressings

New recipe alert! You may have noticed that nut butter is a huge staple of my Little Black Dress meals. I recently thought of some ways to jazz up just spreading it on toast. I came up with a nut butter cocoa crepe recipe. Check out my recipes for the latest.

My latest obsession is Bolthouse Farm salad dressing. These are all yogurt based and include fun traditional flavors like Honey Mustard, Vinaigrette, and Blue Cheese. I am partial to the Blue Cheese. It’s chunky and sour just like Blue Cheese dressing should be, but only 35 calories per tablespoon. So you can have a hefty pour of dressing for between 70-100 calories only added to your salad, and feel like you are eating a restaurant quality salad. All the flavors also make a great dip for snacking on raw veggies. My afternoon snack often contains baby carrots and some type of Bolthouse dressing. Easy and no chopping required.

Another great discovery – Egglife eggwhite wraps. At only 25 calories and 5g of protein each, they are great to pair with brown rice, spinach, and some hot sauce to make a really fun taco. Today I made one with my leftowvers from True Food kitchen where I had ordered this Poke bowl:

Exercise update: compound and push-pull movements.

I haven’t trained like thjis since pre-COVID, because I did not have access to the same kind of equipment .So I am taking it slow, focusing on form, and doing a lot of reps with just the bar or very little weight, especially on the compound movements like squats, deadlifts, and chest press.  A compound exercise is any movement where you’re using more than one muscle group at a time. Consider a squat: This one simple motion engages your core, quads, hamstrings, glutes, calf muscles and hip flexors. Isolation exercises, on the other hand, work one specific muscle group at a time (such as a bicep curl). These exercises are viewed as MORE effective then isolation exercises, but are still useful to complement with “accessory exercise” which focuses on one speciifc muscle area (like the triceps).

Also I came across this great video on how to prevent injury during overhead shoulder presses, which is really useful now that we are focusing on upper body for summer. Shoulder presses can be a great workout, but you really need to make sure your upper back is strong, because a weak upper back will cause you to overcompensate to get the bar/dumbells overhead and thus have bad form, which leaves you susceptible to injury.

Another great weay to ensure musclular balance is by doing push-pull routines. This article does a good job on describing what those are and giving some good examples. My trainers have always preferred this because it helps you achieve muscular balance – i.e., by following a “push” move like a chest or shoulder press with a “pull” move like a row, you are stabilizing the muscles on both sides. Some people organized “push” on one day and “pull” on another day, but I prefer to combine them and strength train three times a week than 5-6 days so I can have alternating cardio days (plus it is a lot less time consuming).