It's a fair question. If you still care to remember, I started my blog very vigourously indeed back in January, posting new content every couple of days and then all of a sudden, I stopped. Life got in the way :)

This spring turned out to be quite eventful. Since I last shared stuff with you quite a few pretty big things happened to me. I was proposed to , I passed the Finnish Language test, started a new job, travelled to Italy and ate like a horse, did a professional "Happy Couple" photo shoot and began organising our small slim Scottish-Russian wedding ;)

Everything is under control. Wow, and summer is here. Life is beautiful.

I started cycling to work and back a few days a week, which is an 19km round trip. It's exhilerating and liberating to feel the wind in your face (except when things fly into and get stuck in your eye) and to know that you are free and rely purely on yourself to get to where you need to go.

I started baking bread. This is a great recipe for sundried tomato soda bread baps. I typically make a batch and it does me every morning for nearly a week for breakfast. Yum.

I got BodyBalance back into my fitness routine as I know that stretching (a core benefit of that class, in addition to building strength and felxibility) is something I'm really bad at doing on a regular basis.

We bought ourselves a food processor and it has been the absolute best investment ever. We churn out smoothies from it all the time and use it for making the bread dough and slicing/chopping/whisking and all that good stuff. Love it.

I will be getting back into my blog, so please stay tuned. Peace to one and all.

Seriously. Back in the days when I was training in Muay Thai, I would often observe the gym and fitness class-goers finishing their Les Mills classes like BodyPump and BodyCombat and a couple of my fellow Thai Boxers and I would say to each other...

We were literally laughing at them. We thought it was so cheesy.

These days I can absolutely, 100%, entirely willingly, EAT MY OWN WORDS. This is my heart rate graph from today's BodyCombat class:

It speaks for itself. Now, you could quite reasonably draw a number of conclusions about this: 

1. We were extremely narrow-minded Thai Boxing snobs...and you'd be quite correct. 
2. This graph indicates that I'm actually quite unfit and the minimal effort required for BodyCombat is way above me...and you'd be wrong! 

In actual fact, I'm in pretty good shape (even if I do say so myself) and am doing a variety of different types of exercises in my routine. I typically head to the gym 5 times a week. So, in my humble opinion, the most reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that group fitness classes can be very intense and extremely physically demanding. BodyCombat is a cardio class, based on various martial arts' influences. Although I don't actually hit anyone or anything any more, I would argue that the cardio effect and fitness training here is definitely not lame. 

It's a fantastic way to release some aggression and just have fun!