Tonight I allowed plenty of time and did the full-blown cardio workout.  It takes just over an hour and frequently I have to cut bits of it because of time pressures. I’m two staff down at work so am working long hours, it’s a pain. Anyway when I say “full-blown” I mean “the exercises they gave me plus the pull-down lats and the chest presses,” and I realise I haven’t noted these latter sets here.

Basically since the start of this six-week block I have felt that my routine didn’t have much in it for my upper body – back, chest and arms. At first I did the chest presses on the swiss ball and I got myself up to 6kg doing that, but I’ve stopped doing that recently. A couple of weeks ago I might have mentioned that I tried the chest press machine that Sarah had me using in the first six-week block and I found that I was right back to those early days in May when I wasn’t sure if I could manage 2 sets of 12 with just the machine at its latent weight let alone any added weights. This made me doubt the efficacy of the chest presses on the ball so occasionally I’ve gone back to the machine and done the 2 sets of 12 as before. It’s still hard work

Ages ago when Sarah started me on my second 6-week block she wanted me to do pull-down lats with the wide grip, and if you remember my right shoulder muscle felt like it was tearing on the return – the downward pull was fine, but going back up to the start position was very painful. Over the last few weeks I’ve been gradually building up this exercise, starting off with just the pull-down lat machine with no weights, then I added 5 kg, now I’m up to 13 kg. I’ve been very careful to make sure the return is slow and measured, on the occasions when I’ve let the counterbalance take the arms up too fast, I have had twinges. I can’t remember what weight Sarah had me trying at, I think it was 10kg but can’t swear to it. Yes I did make it up to 30kg on the narrow-grip exercise, but using the wide grip is much much harder.

Anyway as I say I’ve often had to shave bits off the routine, I always try and make sure I cut a different bit each time to balance everything out, so sometimes I haven’t done my walking, sometimes I haven’t done my second rowing, sometimes I’ve not done the core exercises but have done extra rowing etc. I make sure I’m working for a minimum of 40 minutes each time.

On Wednesday I have my next assessment with Aaron and I’ll talk over the back/chest/arms issue then. The good news on the blood pressure has made me feel a bit more cheerful on the no-weight-loss situation (no change there incidentally) so I’m happy for that goal to slip into to the background and concentrate on the others. I really like the effect the weight training was having on my blood glucose and am happy to do a half-hour cardio every day, even though when Sarah suggested making it 20 minutes I didn’t think I’d find the time (ie I didn’t want to do it). One excellent thing about the current programme was that if I didn’t feel like swimming I could do the cardio routine instead, this has meant that I have missed very few days this time around.

Changes to physical appearance:

Legs – thinner from the side but not from the front. Bizarre. Can feel increased definition of thigh and calf muscles though
Belly – worse than ever. Much flabbier, flobbier, quite revolting. Am I seeing it now as it has always been? I don’t think that’s it – even Podna says my abdomen looks a little “odd”
Chest – leaner. For definite
Back – stronger, firmer, even thin in places.
Neck – dunno. Thinner I think
Arms – stronger. Can carry in much more supermarket shopping without thinking about it
Waist – that four cm is still not there. However the lower abdomen still is very much there so no change in dress size

We’ll see what happens on Wednesday