By Blake Dykes

I know today is Monday, and it’s hard to do anything to get yourself to do anything, much less workout, so I have a quote for all the people that are considering skipping today’s exercise:

“You can’t get much done if you only workout on the days when you feel good.” – Jerry West.

With this being said, I hope you all were able to successfully complete the weekend challenge. If not, no worries, there are plenty of other weekends to come.

Today I want to give you guys one of my most favorite recipes. For all you health freaks that have tons of bananas, this one’s for you. Every once in awhile we forget that our bananas are ripe, and then when you go to eat one you realize they’re brown and overly ripe. DON’T  throw them away. Make some low calorie banana bread.

This weekend I was really craving some, so I threw some ingredients together to create this masterpiece:

– three overly ripe bananas

– one cup self-rising flour

– one cup whole wheat flour

– one tsp. baking powder

– ½ tsp. baking soda

– one tsp. cinnamon

– one tsp. ginger

– ¼ cup of Stevia or honey

– four tbs. peanut butter powder

– six tbs. almond milk

-½ cup pecans

one tbs. raw sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, or flax seeds

Preheat oven to 320 degrees. Combine dry ingredients, mix well. Mash up the bananas in a plastic bag and pour in a bowl. Add the almond milk and honey (if you use that sweetener), and mix together. Add pecans.  Mix the wet ingredients with the dry and pour into an olive oil-coated  pan lightly floured. Then sprinkle your choice of seeds on top. Bake for 1 hour. It will be very dense, but you will know when it’s done because the inside should not be too gooey, and the outside should be crunchy. Let the banana bread cool and sweeten before eating it, and remember to not cook it until the entire inside is set because it will set and get firm as it cools, if you cook it too long it will be crunchy bread and no one wants that.

Don’t forget to workout today, whether it’s a run, bike ride, or one of the workouts you have, just make sure you get it done.

Sweaty Cardio Circuit

• two- minute high knees

• two- minute plank

• two- minute jump rope

• two- minute wall sit

• two-minute mountain climbers

• two-minute wall pushups

• two-minute jog in place

• two- minute squats

After that, do round two with the same exercises, except only for one minute. Then, once you complete that, do the same exercise for 30 seconds.

Tips:

• Go at your own pace, if you can’t do two- minute mountain climbers at a fast pace, slow it down, but do it for the full amount of time.

• This is one of those workouts that you don’t get to have a few second break between, you need to go right from one exercise to the next. It’s completely doable, I designed the workout to where after each vigorous cardio exercise there is a more muscle specific exercise.

Be sure to let me know how you liked the banana bread, any suggestions you may have to make it better, and give me a rating from one to 10 on how hard the workout was.