Thanks for all your comments on yesterday’s post. I’m still feeling blah about everything, but I guess it will pass eventually, hopefully as fall rolls in. I’m feeling a bit better about my gain though. I’m sure it’ll be gone next week, because I really didn’t do anything ‘wrong’, per se.
Also, in my defence, I wrote most of yesterday’s post BEFORE I weighed in, so it wasn’t the gain that caused the funk. Although I’m sure it didn’t help.
Anyway!
Last night I had my free session with a trainer at the Y. Well, it wasn’t really a ‘session’ so much as a fitness assessment, and to help me come up with a plan to meet my goals.
It was good, I guess. It was nice to get my V02 and my resting heart rate, so I could properly program my heart rate monitor. (Turns out my resting heart rate is quite low: 55 bpm!)
The trainer also did not believe that I weighed 205 lbs. She was like, “oh, no, you weigh less than that!” And I said, “Well, I’ve been on three different scales today and they all said about the same thing, so…” She still didn’t believe me, but after I got on her scale and weighed in at exactly 204, she was like, “Hmm, I guess you must have a lot of muscle!” So that made me feel pretty good.
She also seemed to think I’ve been working too hard. I like to do about an hour of cardio at a time, and my heart rate rarely drops below 175 in that hour, which apparently is too much. I guess I just don’t really feel like I’m getting a workout unless I’m really killing it, you know? But she thinks I would do better to work a little less intensely and for a little less time. She recommended a half hour, four times a week, and to keep my heart rate under 160.
So I’m going to give that a shot. It’s so hard to know what’s the right thing to do though. I tried googling it all last night, to see the value of working out at higher vs. lower intensities, and it basically just made me want to go to bed.
Anyway, one useful thing that came out of our session is that she pointed out that the way I currently use the machines (ie., upping the resistance like crazy) is turning my cardio workout into more of a muscle workout. So she showed me how to use the interval setting to focus on speed and pure cardio, rather than a quad workout. So I will be trying that as well. She also gave me a weights routine to do twice a week and encouraged me to combine it with some planks, push-ups, crunches, etc.
So, yeah, it was an okay session. Actually, to be honest, it is just nice to get to sit with a ‘professional’ and do nothing but talk about YOU for an hour and a half. Especially when it’s for free.
