Cardio Core is one of the new classes UTM is offering this semester. Open to all fitness levels, UTM invites students to “Join us for a heart pumping and ab shredding workout! This powerful fusion class will help you get in shape with minimal equipment and space.” It is offered at 12:00 pm on Thursdays, which was a nice break from my busy class schedule.
This week was taught by Hiro, a student from UTM. If you took a Plyo-HIIT workout last semester like I did, you may recognize him. Hiro has a signature style, so the cardio core class had a very similar format to his previous classes.
In the spirit of the name of the class, we ran through two circuits with three rounds each and two cardio and two core exercises per round. Hiro let us know that this class would be a bit harder than usual since he was adding an extra cardio burst to each round, and I can testify that it certainly was difficult.
The first circuit was 40 seconds of jump squats, 20 seconds of lying leg raises, 40 seconds of more jump squats, and 20 seconds of V-sit in and outs. In each round of these moves, we modified the jump squats to keep things spicy and engaging, but my thighs were burning from the copious amount of jump squats. In the second round, we switched to side-to-side jump squats and in the third round, forward jump squats.
The second circuit was 40 seconds of burpees, 20 seconds of planks with knee to opposite elbow, 40 seconds of burpees, and 20 seconds of Russian twists. I am not a fan of burpees, but to Hiro’s credit, they definitely got my heart rate up. The planks were especially hard following burpees, which were also hard on the arms.
We started with modified burpees, moved to jumping burpees in the second round and full burpees with push-ups in the third round.
Hiro ended the class with a plank challenge similar to the one we did in Bootcamp, but this time, we did two minutes of elbow planking. The music throughout the class was electronic dance music, which isn’t exactly my style, and since I was really needing the motivation, I decided to play my own music. Luckily, I was still able to hear Hiro’s descriptions of the circuits and follow along well.
