Working Out With A Trainer…

I’m an avid fan of The Biggest Loser.  That is probably what inspired me to start training.

I started training almost two years ago.  My first trainer, Dom, was a young guy in his early twenties. He loved to make me do jump squats, lunges and lift heavy weights. A couple of the patrons at the gym said they thought Dom was like Rembrandt because he was totally reshaping my body.  But was Rembrandt a sculpture?

My second trainer, Paul, was at first into Kettle bells.  He was convinced that they worked well for both loosing weight and gaining endurance. After some time, we switched it up to focusing on pull ups and pull downs. What I liked about training with him was that he was very encouraging.

Recently, I changed gyms and have been going to a gym in Hicksville where I train with Mario. Like Dom, Mario is also in his early twenties. He’s into a thing called, “active rest.”  What is active rest you may ask?  In between sets, he makes me do jumping jacks, jump squats or some other jumping activity.  Sometimes I feel like I’m just jumping for 40 minutes. (But, I’m really not.)

He also likes to see me do sets of things.  For example, the other day, I walked across the gym doing lunges and then got on the treadmill and ran at faster pace than I normally run.  This would last for about two minutes and then I would do the whole thing again for a number of three times.  After that, it was stairs. “Run up the stairs five times and in between do wall sits for a number of seconds and then do the whole thing again until you get to running one flight of stairs,” he said.

The other day, my trainer comes up to me and says, “we’re going to do something different.” He proceeded to write on a pad what he wanted me to do. Here’s the list:

25 pull ups

25 deadlifts

25 push ups

25 curl and press

25 “v’s” with my legs together

Do this twice and then end with 25 pull ups

He told me it should take 40 minutes. I finished the routine in 25 minutes. “Wow, I didn’t think you could do that so fast,” he said. “Do you want to do something else?”

“Ummm, that’s okay,” I said.

You can imagine what I look like when I finished! I have never sweat so much in my entire life. So do I have an amazing body yet after almost two years at the gym? Not yet, but it’s a work in progress.

Lucky for me, all three of them have been so nice. Although they are not a Jillian Michaels or a Bob Harper, I’m good!