Hearty Chicken Minestrone Soup

If you've been following me for a while, you know that I used to hate leg day. Despise may have been a better term for my feelings toward leg day. Now, not only do I do legs twice a week, I actually look forward to it and enjoy it! This started happening during Jamie Eason's trainer when I started doing legs twice a week to follow the plan exactly. After I started seeing results and changes in my legs, I decided eh, maybe this isn't so bad. I love that I can lift what seems really heavy for me both when squatting and leg pressing and I love that leg day kicks my butt every time! This year, I want to keep working on those glutes and I'm aiming for quad seperation so I'm going to keep up with my 2-a-weeks for legs. Here is what I did today:

Squats: 1 warm up set and 3 additional sets of 8-10

Walking lunges: 10 down 10 back, 3 sets 

Leg extension 4 sets of 10, last set is a drop set 

Lying leg curl superset with adductor machine: 3 sets of 10 each

Standing calf raises 3 sets of 12

Seated calf raises 3 sets of 12 

Do this then prepare yourself to eat a whole loaf of bread. I think I have a mental thing because every leg day I'm extra hungry for carbs, but I just keep telling myself it's all in my head :) (You do need to increase your calories/carbs a bit on leg day, but not as much as my stomach/head would like me to!) To make my stomach/head happy I try to fill up on as many veggies as possible so I made another variation of chicken and veggie soup. This recipe has more of a minestrone taste and it goes really well with clean cheddar biscuits!

Ingredients

2 crowns of broccoli, chopped

2 large carrots, chopped

2 celery sticks, chopped

1/2 yellow onion, chopped

1 package french green beans cut in half

3 Roma tomatoes chopped

1 can low sodium garbanzo beans

1 qt low sodium chicken broth

1 can low sodium tomato sauce

2 bay leaves

1 tsp pepper, oregano, rosemary and basil

1 tsp minced garlic

3-4 chicken breasts

Directions

1. I chop all my veggies the night before, so in the morning I can just toss them all in the crock pot.

2. Combine all ingredients and mix well.

3. Cook for 5 1/2 hours on low.

4. Once cooked, shred chicken with a fork and serve!

What's your least favorite body part to workout, and do you think you'll ever eventually like it?