A Concrete Fitness Experience – Week 1

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We started with a little cardio.  Get the body warmed up and the pulse up to about 120 so that you can be ready to work out.  The treadmill will do that for you in very little time.We moved from cardio to some simple strength training (with free weights and machines) that included some range of motion exercises.  We did some coordination exercises like bunny hops, scissor kicks, hop-scotch and other things with a rope ladder on the floor.Wednesday we worked on our upper-body.  The cardio was a little different.  We were given a choice between the elliptical machine or the recumbent bike.  I took the elliptical, but the range of motion is a little too much for me to handle with my injury for right now.  I’m gonna stick with the recumbent bike.  We did some curls with free weights from an inclined bench so that it stretched out the biceps and shoulder.  Boy that felt good.  We did some crunches on a balance ball and I’m a real fan of that one!!!  There were lots of different things that Stuart had us doing that day that I never even thought I would be able to do again.  I even did push ups… I haven’t tried to do push ups since I got injured.  I just assumed that I wouldn’t be able to.Thursday started on the bike to get my body warmed up and I finished up before the girls so I tried some inclined leg presses, some butterfly exercises and some leg curls.  Then Stuart put us to work.  Leg curls were there, as were squats (which were extremely painful but I was able to do them!), Romanian dead lifts and lunges on a half-ball.  Stuart wanted us doing a walking lunge where we passed a ball through our legs in the middle of the stride.  My range of motion isn’t that good and I couldn’t do the exercise so he modified it to lunge onto the ball.  That’s the only exercise that I haven’t been able to do.Am I sore?  YES!  Am I gonna quit? NO!!!I haven’t felt this good in years.I’m slowly making changes to my diet.  I haven’t eaten so much sugar or white food this week.  I’m starting to change the way I think about food.I’m not saying that my whole world is different, but I can definitely see things from a different perspective now.I notice that I smoke less on days when I work out.  That’s got to be a good thing, right?I hope that you’ll take a look at this and keep up with our progress at Anytime Fitness.  I encourage you to come and try the club out.  It’s a different culture from any other club I’ve ever been to.  It’s a welcoming environment and the people who are there working out look a lot like us.  They’re people who just decided that they want a change.  Come join us on our journey.  Click into our articles and find out how we’re doing.  Join the gym and write your own article.  We’ll print it.  We want to be healthy and we want you to be healthy, too.]]]]> ]]>