It has been awhile since I last blogged about going to the gym, so I thought it was high time for a quick update: progress is being made.
No, I’m not losing weight, yet – although I will say I think that in the past week there is movement in that direction.
I am, however, getting thinner: I know this for a fact.
On the weights front, I thought it would be fun to look back at where I was 4 months ago – I cannot look back to where I was when I started because I didn’t think to have my workout printed out, but now I do and in April I was doing 70 kg on the leg press. Today I am supposed to do 110 kg, but I often do 120 kg.
The abdominal crunch machine, last April I was doing 22.5 kg, now, errr… my trainer wants me to do 45 kg, but to be honest I find that to be a bit too much, so I am somewhere between 35 and 40 kg.
My greatest struggle remains with the shoulder press where I’ve made limited progress, increasing from 12.5 kg to 17.5 kg – although I’m under the distinct impression that this particular motion is quite difficult for a lot of people as this is the machine where 50% of the time I’m putting on more weight than the person before me: no other machine does that happen more than 30% of the time.
Meanwhile, on the cardio front, I’m finding that I can essentially go forever, assuming I’m in the right mood. Today, for example, with the right music plugged in, I went 95 minutes straight on the elliptical-like machine known at the Vario. When I get going I respond viscerally to the music and the right music can make me put in a lot of effort, so it wasn’t just 95 minutes of cardio, it was 95 minutes of hard cardio, although it didn’t actually feel like work.
Of course that omits the fact that this afternoon I took a two-hour long nap – something that is undoubtedly a consequence of the cardio.
What kind of music do you find you respond best to?
Right now I’m responding best to Lady Gaga — 93 minutes from start to finish — and since I’m tracking my “speed”– one can almost see the beats per minutes for the songs that I am listening to…
I imagine that at some point I will get bored and need a new muse.