Exercise

Exercise - not my favourite word. You could say that I hate the thought of exercise. Whilst I do exercise I don't exercise enough.

Now its good that Brad has joined the gym with me, as he tends to drag me there. Once I'm at the gym I'm OK and get on with my workouts and I do feel fantastic (tired) but fantastic afterwards. You would think that would be enough to get me there, but NO its not.

My trainer has mapped out the following program for me:-

10 mins warm up on the treadmill.
15 mins on the x-trainer
15 mins on the exercise bike
6 mins on the rower
3 x 8 reps of upper body weights
10 mins warm down on the treadmill.

I burn just over 400 calories on the above program according to my HRM.

Brad's program is similar. he doesn't have to do the exercise bike instead he has more weights to do, which only take say 5 mins and finishes before I do. You would think that he would use the treadmill until I'm finished but no he sits down and waits for me to finish. Annoys me really.

Now that all seems easy enough and pretty straight forward. All I can say is that everything is except for the x-trainer and that is hard.

Since joining the gym I can't believe how much my fitness has decreased. I guess it has been 18 months since I've last been on a x-trainer and then I was doing 20 mins on the machine, on levels between 7-10. Now I back to the beginning on level 1 and can only do 7 mins and then it really hurts my legs. I can't wait to get my gym fitness back up..... Mind you my overall program is longer & a bit harder than it use to be and the only really hard part of it is the x-trainer. We have decided to go 5 days per week. The above program we do 3 days per week and on the other 2 days I do the following program:- 22 mins including warm up on the treadmill. 22 mins on the exercise bike 3 x 8 reps of upper body weights 22 mins including warm down on the treadmill. This program burns about 350 calories according to my HRM. I found that I needed to give my legs a rest of a day from the x-trainer. When using the exercise bike I tend to use the random hills setting and use level 5. I did start on level 4 but after a few days it got a bit too easy. Level 5 is still a bit of a challenge on the high hills but I'm sure it will get easier as time goes on. Carlton