Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.
Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.
Under the guidance of a cycling coach, I'm spending more time in the saddle and riding not just longer, but smarter. Power meters, training plans, and intervals will be the order of the day.
Getting back into the gym this week after a month long hiatus, I'm reminded of the last time I went to a gym regularly back in the late 90s. After a few months of dutifully lifting weights three times a week, I hit a lull in my enthusiasm for it because I felt like I was merely tearing my muscles up every other day, and recuperating when I wasn't working out. I was always sore and never felt satisfied or good about the work I was doing. I did very monotonous and repetitive routines and simply added weight each week to measure my progress.
Luckily this time around I have a trainer and he changes things up week to week and we barely focus on weight (I don't actually even know how much I'm lifting or pushing most times -- we just talk in relative terms of harder or easier). The difference between having a trainer varying workouts versus following a list exactly every day in the gym is night and day. I'm satisfyingly exhausted at the end of each workout and while I might be a bit sore during the in between days (not so sore I can't get hours of riding in), it's nothing like the robotic routine of tear, rebuild, tear, rebuild.
I never thought I'd say it, but I actually like working out now.
Posted on February 14, 2009 in gym | Permalink | Comments (0)