The Biggest Workout Yet!

Hey there phat fans, sorry it took me a while to get on line and make this post today. You'll have to forgive me, I was absolutely shattered after the gym this morning. I arrived right on time for the session with the trainer at 9:00 a.m. It was such a massive session that I only just got home before 12:00 p.m. This is longest gym session I have done in a very long time, and I found it quite tough.

We got underway with me having to run around the gym three times at pace, and then I went straight into a set of 15 pushups. Next up, and without a break was alternating dumbell shoulder presses on top of the swiss ball for 15 each arm, followed by a half way sit up holding the medicine ball and twisting from side to side. I had to do three sets of this in total, and for the second and third set while running I was holding 5kg dumbells for good measure.

During this part of the session the trainer kept reminding me that she was going to weigh me, something that I had not forgotten. It sounded like she expected me to have put on weight, or to be worried about being weighed for some reason. I'm not sure why, I don't fear the scales, and I knew she was going to weigh me, she always does on a Thursday.

Next up were bent over rows with the olympic bar and 5kg on each side (30kg). I did 15 of those followed immediately by 15 lateral raises with the 10kg dumbells, followed by 15 squats holding the same dumbells. This was tough and I started to huff and puff like crazy, but I stuck at it. The trainer said she noticed that when doing squats my heart rate shoots up and I start to get fatigued. She did not know why this woud be the case, nor what it meant, if anything. We rounded out the session with me doing some tricep extensions on a pulley machine. I have no idea what the weight was, but it was manageable.

After that it was time for me to be weighed. I soon discovered that the trainer did not know how to use the sliding scale mechanism on the main scales in the gym. She kept trying to move the larger weight that measure 10kg blocks to gague what I was, rather than set it, and then narrow it down with the smaller weights. I took over and managed to establish what the problem she was having was; I was no longer over 140 kgs! I set it on 130 and used the smaller weights to up the measure to 139.5. After some tuning and balancing, evetually we settled on 139.8 as the balanced weight. I was really happy with that as it means that I may have achieved the first goal I set myself, subject to the official weigh in tomorrow of course. Fingers crossed for tomorrow, however I am now fairly confident and if anything expect to be lighter after all that effort this morning.

The trainer said that she wanted to weigh me on the scales that also check your body fat percentage. These were the scales that wouldn't work properly when I last went in there at 145kgs. She got it set up and I hopped on. On those scales I weighed 137.8 kgs, which seemed right as you have to take your shoes off for them to work. Unfortunately they also said my body fat percentage was 45% which is far too high, but didn't really come as that much of a surprise. Also, I doubt the accuracy of the measuring system it uses for body fat percentage, it does seem to vary a bit as I notice it changed as I was moving around on the scales.

I was pretty pleased with the results and was a bit perplexed when the trainer said to me "Right. I am going to be cross with you now. You have done well, but you have a long way to go. You must realise that you have to get your heart rate down so that you can train more than you have been able to. You are too fat and have so much to lose. This is good, but you have such a long way to go you must do more. 51 kilos is a lot to lose and you will have to keep working hard to get all of that fat off you".

I was a bit taken aback. I simply said to her "This is good news, not bad. On Tuesday you said you wanted to see a 750g loss. I have lost twice that. There is no way I am going to feel bad about having lost over 5 kgs since I started. This is good, and I feel good". She didn't like that much and said she was going to keep my locker key until I had done my cardio. This meant that I had to do the entire usual session that she has written out for me. I told her that was fine, I'll do it but I needed my key firstly to get her money, and second to get my notebook to record the data for my spreadsheet. She did hand it over, but it was a very bizzare end to the session. I think she was in a funny mood all day, maybe she is having problems somewhere else and wanted to take them out on someone. The reference to 51 kilos was strange, 100kgs is my goal, and this is what I told her.

I then went and did two 25 minute sessions of cardio on the treadmill, as is fast becoming my habit. My foot held up well, however now that I have arrived back home I see a couple of fresh blisters on my feet which is a bit of a shame. They haven't popped so if I look after them I should be able to avoid the problems I had with the last blister. You can click on the link to my cardio chart to see what I managed to do during the cardio workout. Note that the cardio workout was done after the weigh in with the trainer, this is why I suspect that I may weigh less tomorrow. She told me I would "burn fat" if I did the cardio straight after the session with her.

So, all in all a pretty good day really. I feel tired and may have a sleep this afternoon to help with the recovery. I do feel tired, but nothing hurts any more than it should for the first time in a while so I think I might be starting to turn the corner! Let's hope so, this fight against fat is going to be a long and torrid contest I think! Check in tomorrow to see how I get on with the official weigh in.