Gym numbers

[fivemack]

My company decided to buy us all gym membership as a perk; the gym is conveniently located between the office, which is three minutes from my house, and the centre of town, so I really have no excuse not to go.

I was Assessed and given an exercise schedule; I'm writing it down here to demonstrate my unfitness to the gym-visiting parts of the watching world, and because it is less likely to be lost as an LJ post than as a bit of blue card in a poorly-organised box file in the gym, and in the hope that I might be able to look back in December next year and marvel at how small the weights I could lift in 2007 were, and with how few reps.



Two sets of

Bicep curls, 8lb weight, 20 of
Vertical row, 8lb weight, 20 of
Raise arms from side to parallel with shoulders, 5lb weight, 20 of
Bar-bell lift from sternum to full arm extension, 20kg extra weight, 10 of
Triceps exercise (one knee up on weights-bench, other leg stretched out; bring arm back from parallel to knee to full extension), 8lb weight, 15 of
Ten minutes on aerobic machine of choice (I think they'd like me to row, but nothing has yet been invented more tedious than the rowing machine)
Abs crunches, 20 of
Plank (upper arms flat on floor in front of you, elbows together; push up onto tiptoe) 20s, 2 of
Abs crunches, 20 more of

This takes about three quarters of an hour, and leaves me thoroughly sweaty and with shoulders and abs strongly reminding me of their continued presence.


Running on the treadmill makes my knee hurt within a minute; walking on the treadmill, or using the elliptical machines or the stepping machine, makes me sweat, and my heart rate rise from 140 to 170 over ten minutes, but my knee's OK.

Comments

[redbird]

I'm not sure whether I want to say "Have fun" or "Good luck." A bit of both, I think--if the particular exercises on that list are painful or unbearably tedious, find different ones, or a whole different kind of exercise. That I like weight lifting and machines doesn't mean they're the right choice for everyone--exercises you won't do, or that exacerbate any underlying problems, are useless or worse.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

These are the exercises that I was prescribed when I said that I wanted to get to the point that I could plausibly go to climbing walls without completely running out of upper body strength within fifteen minutes (the local climbing walls are an hour by car away, so I have to go with a group, and they stay for two hours, so to have my muscles unusable after fifteen minutes is singularly tedious), and with luck to lose a little weight besides; so they're all upper-body stuff. The fitness coach started by trying me on a number of the strength-improving machines (the ones where you lift a stack of weights using various parts of your body) and decided that I was generally OK and didn't really need those.

I've arranged to see both a sports-massage person and a doctor about my underlying problem (a dodgy left knee); it would be particularly good if that could get cleared up. The other underlying problem is exercise-induced asthma, but I've got an inhaler which provides pretty much immediate relief, and I'm not sure that there's anything beyond general fitness that would really help with that.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

That's not enough aerobics :-)

But it isn't, really, 20 minutes a day is the healthy minimum. Trick is to find what you like, bring an iPod or whatever, and keep going. Me, I actually like rowing. On the other hand, walking has the advantage of being something you can do anywhere, with only decent shoes.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

This is like my argument about cycling machines - that I have a perfectly good bicycle, which I can get on and cycle for several hours and end up somewhere interesting after seeing attractive bits of countryside (unless I cycle to March). On the other hand, demonstrably I don't get on the bicycle and cycle daily, because there isn't much worth the visiting at twenty minutes by bike from my house, whilst I suppose I *could* use the cycling machine daily.

[there is 20 minutes in the schedule, I'm supposed to run through the whole thing twice]

An iPod is probably a sensible idea; the gym has background music, and three TVs whose sound channel I could listen to if I brought my own earphones, but my desire to listen to either MTV or BBC News 24 for twenty minutes of aerobic exercise isn't great, and ten minutes of rowing to Stan Rogers might be less unendurable.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that you have reasonable cardivascular fitness, as a good cyclist. But nothing to get complacent about ;-)

How quickly does your breathing/heart rate return to resting level?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Bicycles are nice; the problem is that they're way easy, and you have to really work on getting your heart rate up. There aren't too many aerobic training machines which concentrate on upper-body endurance; I've seen arm bikes, but they're not common. Have you considered looking for a gym with a climbing wall, since upper-body endurance is a big goal for you?

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I find the rowing machine gets tolerably untedious if I can convince myself that I'm being chased by alligators.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I perceive a business plan involving alligator rental.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I wish a) I had a 3 minute commute and b) my work would give me perks.