Feelin the Burn: Exercise with a Personal Trainer
I did it. I hired a personal trainer. Actually, first, I joined a gym again. I was using the free one at school and then once I decided to switch my graduate studies, I figured my gym membership at school would go with it. Bye bye free elliptical, hello gym payments.
Re-joining Kinetix, a gym I first went to after having my first baby, meant going back to something I assumed would be familiar. However this time I actually took them up on the first free personal training session and met with Emily. Emily, it turns out, is a friend of mine on Facebook and we have a lot of IRL (in real life) friends in common. So it was about time we met!
Anyways, I have gotten to know Emily here in the past few weeks and I have learned a few things about working with a personal trainer. For one- they can always push you harder than you can push yourself. Meaning I thought I was in fantastic shape, but then I did the body assessment and found out that I actually am in the unhealthy zone for body fat, and therefore my 45 minute trips on the elliptical and machine weight lifting clearly weren’t cutting it. Also- I’m not sleeping enough! Ding ding ding- and yes I knew that but that also means my body is producing more cortisol, which produces fat.
Ugh. So, another concern I have had is- while this will be a new series here on the site, how can I communicate to my whole audience about fitness and how this is important for people of all sizes and shapes without coming across as gratuitous, or talking about things I’m not educated on, or sounding like the girl who looks skinny but always whines about feeling fat?
And this is why I’ve enlisted Emily to start her own column here to both parallel my journey in this as well as to give general fitness tips and advice for people of all ages and shapes and all.
Back to what I have learned. I am doing better than I expected in my training, although sometimes I need Emily to tell me that. Circuit training and Crossfit type exercises are working me out more than weight machines. And…. I got complacent on those weight machines. And there’s a chance that I was workout out too much. As Emily told me- I don’t need to be in the gym working out super hard everyday. You can get to the point where you are burning off muscle, not fat. And your body needs rest.
With that being said- it’s 10:30 guys and gals. I’m going to try and get some sleep! I’ll try and get a photographer to come along next time so you can see the struggle in real time action.
Til next time….
Love to all y’all!
Molly
