April Monthly Challenge: Hoops, ropes, jumps & protein

When I posted in February about hula hooping at work for a Wellness Fair some of my readers got excited and wanted this as a challenge. Because I assume most people don’t have hula hoops around I wanted to give a heads up to my readers to go out and buy a hula hoop and jump rope, if they wanted.
I recently visited Toys R Us and am armed with a hula hoop and jump rope.
So for Go Fit Girl!’s April Monthly Challenge, your challenges are:
Exercise: Old school exercise. Let’s go back to being a kid. Let’s hula hoop and jump rope.
If you can’t hula hoop at all April is your chance to aim to get that hoop to go around your waist at least 10 consecutive times. Practice this a few times a week. Once you hit that goal, build from there with trying 20 and so on. If you can already hula, set your goal to go for a minute, 2, 5, 10 …
When hula hooping, remember it is all in the waist and hips. Other body parts do not need to be involved. This Hula Hoop Basics Video is pretty good. She shows the basics, a few minor “fancy moves.” She also starts to lose the hoop a few times and brings it back up without touching the hoop with her hands.
If you just can’t hula, get tips from this little guy’s hula hoop video. You gotta watch the whole thing. It’s awesome.
If you just can’t jump rope more than a few times before stopping, work on building that. Once you get a rhythm going jump for 3 minutes, then 5 and increase as the month goes on. Jumping rope burns a lot of calories.
If you just don’t want to jump rope, don’t have one, didn’t win one, don’t want to buy one, you can do the move we regularly do in my Monday night body conditioning class. Here’s a good video to show you how to jump without the rope. And this one isn’t a joke. 🙂
If you don’t want to hula hoop or jump rope how about old school jumping jacks? Find a good song with a beat you can jump to.  If you are opting in to the hula and jump rope challenge feel free to add the jumping jacks. Sounds like a great cardio routine to me.
If you have kids in your life, maybe you can get them to join in on this exercise challenge as well. It will be fun for everyone.
Nutrition: I love to talk about protein and eat it as well. So I am making this a challenge this month.
Focus on getting in enough protein every day this month.
Depending on your weight, sex and activity level the protein you need to eat every day varies. This WebMD article gives us a general idea of how much we should consume every day.
This Livestrong article says: The Institutes of Medicine Food and Nutrition Board recommend women between the ages of 14 and 70 consume 46 g of protein per day.
If you know you don’t get enough protein in every day, I think 46 g is a good goal. I know I need to get in a little more than that every day since I am pretty active.
Feel free to post your progress in the comments section below or on the Facebook event page.