Back to the Exercise Programme

Until about 2 weeks before we moved, I was exercising 6 days a week, but then preparations for moving house took over and I only managed a couple of times a week. Not long after we moved here, Rob and I joined the local gym, the Hampshire Tennis and Health Club, which is about a mile away. Included in the (ridiculously high) membership price are three sessions with a personal trainer, and my first one was this morning with Ben, an ex-army officer who's originally from Bolton, down the road from Manchester.

He's set me a programme based on my going to the gym four days a week - if I want to exercise more often than that, I can go running on the road or just repeat one of the four sessions in my gym programme. I have two sessions of cardio-vascular work only - cross-trainer, stepper or upright bike, or a combination of these if I don't want to stay on the same machine the whole time - then two sessions of a short CV workout combined with other exercises: weight machines for one session and mat work for the other. Both the weights and the mat sessions are intended to work all my major muscle groups - he's picked 6 weight machines which work my legs, chest, shoulders, back, arms and tummy, and the mat ('functional') exercises are intended to simulate movements that I do every day, like bending down, reaching out, squatting etc.

By the time we went over my aims and objectives and did a couple of minutes on all the machines and mat exercises, I'd already been there nearly an hour and a half, so this morning I just did a further 25-minute session on the cross-trainer and I'll do one of the combined CV/other exercise sessions tomorrow. I'll have my second personal trainer session with Ben in 3 or so weeks' time to assess my progress, at which point he said he will modify the programme if needs be.