Tenner Week April 2015: Day 6

We’ve made it to the weekend now, so we’re into the home stretch. How is your budget holding out?

Today’s activity – or Mini Mission as it’s recently been dubbed – is to look for a way to get toned up. I’m not going to put pressure on you to get a beach body, or ‘bikini ready’ or anything like that, but it IS good to include some toning exercises as part of your general fitness and there are lots of potential benefits, not just how you look in your swimmies.

For example, you could work on your core strength today. This helps your posture, and can help to reduce back pain, amongst many other things. Alternatively, you could work on any area of your body that you know needs a bit of extra help to become stronger, such as your upper body, shoulders, back or whatever you like.

You might like to try one or more of these today:

• Pilates matwork (DVD, Blu-Ray, YouTube)
• Yoga (slower forms are best for beginners, don’t go right into Ashtanga-style stuff)
• Sit-ups or abdominal crunches
• Ballet-style barre exercises, particularly for lower body
• Light weights (or bottles of water, or baked bean cans) for upper body

Do some stretches and gentle warming up beforehand, and don’t blast loud music if these are exercises that you haven’t tried before (or haven’t done for a long time) as this can make you work too fast and risk straining yourself. Go slowly through the full range of movement, and observe how your body is responding to the activity.

Try doing plenty of light repetitions of the exercises, rather than a forcing your body to do a few very strenuous ones. If you’re fitter, then by all means do some tougher exercises towards the end of your workout, once you’re nicely warmed up.

This should all be completely free too – hurrah!

What’s happening here

I decided to have a little treat yesterday, and bought myself a small bar of chocolate. A Maltesers Teasers bar to be exact. I don’t do things like that very often so it was a nice little break in my day, although it’s not something I’ll be making a habit of as it can’t be all that healthy and it isn’t exactly top quality chocolate either.

I also sorted out a few old CDs to sell, and will be boxing that up later when I have a moment. All proceeds will be going to my currently tiny holiday fund, and I suppose every little helps, plus it’s nice to clear some room in the house as part of the ongoing spring cleaning efforts.

Dinner was tasty: risotto with roasted pumpkin, sage and chilli. The risotto rice was from a Lidl offer last year, and the roasted pumpkin was one of my home grown ones from the kitchen garden that was in the freezer. There was fresh sage from the garden, and a pinch of dried chilli flakes, an onion and some ‘mousetrap’ cheese on top.

Today I’ll be working over the kitchen garden in earnest, now the weeds and perennial plants have started getting going for the warmer months. Can’t keep putting it off, plus a little effort now potentially means a lot of free food later.

Oh, and I’ll be getting the Pilates ball out and doing a bunch of different sit-ups at some point. That plus the gardening will probably turn out to be a full-body workout.

While that’s going on, I’ve left a batch of pizza dough out to defrost. Thinking about making calzones with it this evening, and having fresh garden salad on the side. Let’s see how much energy I have left later…

Total spent yesterday: 70p

Total spent so far: £1.70

How’s your budget looking? Do you have any tips about tasty, thrifty meals, or ways to keep yourself entertained without spending £££ that you’d like to share?