Due to one thing or another I was very late getting to my assessment with Aaron on Wednesday, so I suggested we rearrange – however we did spend a few minutes talking, so I was able to say everything I wanted to say – about my performance, about the lack in the previous programme of work for my upper body, about my goals.  Aaron then took all that away and came up with a plan.  I went in yesterday to go through it with him. Here it is:

Cardio – 30 minutes:
Row for 4 mins
Bike – 10 mins Bike programme 1, level 12. I tried this later and I couldn’t do it, I flaked out after five minutes
Treadmill – walk for 10 minutes, minimum 5.5kph, start at 2% incline and move to 4% after 5 minutes. This will be tough too. Those inclines don’t sound like much compared to the hills that you walk up and down on regular streets in real life, but I think the difference is, in real life you vary your speed, whereas on the treadmill you are forced to maintain it.
Row for another 4 minutes

Weights – a circuit:
Clean and Jerk with 10kg bag – 3 sets of 10, when that gets easy, do 3 sets of 12. This works every muscle group in the body, apparently.
Lat pull-downs, wide grip (yay!) 10kg/side (ie 20kg) 3 sets of 10, up to 3 sets of 12. Looking forward to this.
Single Row and Tricep kickback with 4kg dumbbells – 3 sets of 10 each side, up to 3 sets of 12 each side. Well I did ask for stuff for the upper body. This will work the whole shoulder and arm groups

Physio exercises – for the dodgy knees – squats, lunges, bridges (might put the bridges onto the end of the core exercises, I’ll need something to wind down with)

Core exercises – 2 sets, rising to 3 once they get easy (hah!)
Pelvic tilts, as before, but do them slower – 15 reps
Ab crunch on swiss ball – have the ball in the small of my back, hands on shoulders, rise and drop back – 10 reps. This one had me shaking like a leaf.
Hamstring curls – feet on the ball, back on the floor, hips off the ground, roll the ball towards me. 10 reps. Felt like I would never be able to bend my legs again

This is really tough for me but I have no doubt I will be able to do it. I might do one set of each for the first couple of times, and I might drop the cycle programme down to 10. But I expect to be doing the new programme by Friday next week. I’m really glad to have some weights training back into the mix because as I told him, I loved what that did for my blood sugar as well as giving me muscles I have never had before. And the core exercises are really difficult – the last batch weren’t much of a challenge.

I now discover Aaron has a bit of a reputation around the girls’ changing room for pushing you really hard and he is certainly doing that for me. I am somewhat daunted by the leap from where I was to where he expects me to be now (that cycling programme in particular), but I am looking forward to being at that place. And yesterday, even though I hadn’t done the full programme, I was holding onto the wall in the shower and stumbling about, the way I was when I first started with Sarah. In a word, I was completely knackered. I will improve from this