You’ve got to learn to love the pain. Love it like the Dewey Decimal System or a brand new book! When you’re shredding your calves, and you feel the fiery agony of the ripping and tearing you know the pain is coming, and the pain is good! You’ve got to remember you’re a mad, crazy animal, a freakish alien monstrosity of muscularity! The only way to the pleasure of a sculpted physique is through punishment.
Work it hard library lady! Soon you’ll have a back like 20 miles of bad road, racehorse legs, and an ass you can bounce quarters off of!
Well, I could wipe my butt just fine, it’s getting back up off the toilet that was a bit of a challenge. (It’s much better today.) We didn’t do anything I thought was too much at all - two machines, squats (with no weight, against a ball), step-ups, and lunges. A bit of uphill treadmill at the end. Nothing was too much weight or difficult to the point where I was afraid of injuring myself; I don’t think he had to call anything off, lighten it, or shorten reps because I didn’t look like I could handle it. I’m really out of shape, though. Profoundly. If my family weren’t given to slimness I’d probably be enormously fat - maybe that’s deceptive. I know he expected me to be pretty sore the next day, but I’m not sure if I was still supposed to be gimping around yesterday. I honestly don’t think he’s a bad trainer at all, though - the workout was challenging but not at all stupid. Just the aftereffects are.
So. Next time I’ll try:
Aleve
Warm Jello, why the hell not?
Hair of the dog, before and after (sort of hard before, as I’m going to the trainer because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my workout routine)
Water
Spa, but cautiously - if I’d climbed into a tub Thursday I’d never have made it back out!
And I hate the Dewey Decimal system. I’d really like to be a lot stronger, though, so I can carry heavy crap around in the garden. Because that’s not a librarian stereotype at all.
I have a question that’s related to this. I, too, have begun working out for the first time since high school. I went for the first time since my first session with my trainer a couple days ago, and the next day my upper arms and shoulders were sore. Not like OH MY GOD, I CAN’T LIFT MY ARMS sore, but pretty achy. The rest of my body was perfectly fine (except for a little twinge in my left thigh). I figured I should be a little bit sore at first, it’s a sign of progress, so I was going to up the weight a bit on everything but the upper arm and shoulder stuff, but my fiance tells me that I should do the opposite, stay the same on everything, except reduce the weight on the machines that work my upper arms and shoulders since I’m not trying to get bulky, I’m just trying to increase my strength a bit, tone the muscles, etc, and that’s why my trainer put me on heavy repetitions, the point isn’t increasing the weight, the point is just exercising the muscles. I think he might be full of it. I vaguely recall my trainer saying I could increase the weight if I felt like it was too easy. Of course I’m going to speak to the trainer about it, but I’m going to the gym a few times before I see her next, and I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do until then, increase the weight or not?
If you want to increase strength, then sooner or later you will need to increase the weight. I wouldn’t increase on the upper arm and shoulder work until you get thru the same workout you now do without excessive soreness. Being able to feel it the next day is not quite the same thing - part of gaining experience is finding out what is growth and what is damage.
Most women express this concern about getting bulky. This is sort of like not practicing the piano for fear you will turn into Liberace. You won’t become Liberace unless you are genetically predisposed to be Liberace. Similarly, you won’t get bulky unless you have the genetic potential to become bulky, and spend years of effort to do that specifically. It’s not going to happen by accident.
For a beginner, I would still recommend the standard 3 sets of eight on the basic exercises - squat or leg press, bench press, pulldowns and/or rowing, calf raises, leg curls, biceps curls, and crunches. Increase the weight when you get to three sets of twelve. Women generally try weights that are too light; men that are too heavy.
Most likely a combination of all. I like the possibility of #3 the best, somehow.
I have a question about the jello thing—do you melt 2 T of prepared jello in a cup of warm water? Or is it a cup of warm water with 2T jello powder in it? Seems funny to ask for a recipe for this, and maybe I’m just dense, but I’m willing to give it a gamble as I work on regaining the running mileage I was doing last Fall before I got injured.
This sounds like a Ballys trainer. I have no idea why, but they love to do this to their clients in those first couple sessions. My theory is that it’s a sales tactic.
Basically it works like this, most people who get a training session from Ballys are very new to the gym concept and are pretty seriously out of shape. They also are not that likely to ever become “regular” clients in the manner that higher-end personal trainers are for the semi-rich. As a result, they figure that they need to prove their value to the customer by driving them through a strenuous workout they’ll remember, especially the following week. That way, they’ll be shocked by how out of shape they feel and after they’ve gotten lazy 6 months later they’ll re-up for a new crash course.
If they did the proper thing, a slow build up with gradually increasing levels of strain, the first few sessions would seem unnecessary. When you’re an “expert” and all you’ve made the out-of-shape customer do is some zero resistance calisthenics for the first 4 sessions, the client is likely to start question what the hell they are paying for. Sad but true.
Just a guess, but then again they could just be stupid and/or poorly trained and thinking that this type of scorched earth training is a good thing for a neophyte.
I just dumped a couple spoons of the powder in water I heated up in the microwave. I mean, I’m not swearing by it or anything, but Jello’s cheap and it sure can’t hurt.
It’s not Bally’s, it’s a local gym. How I felt after the upper body session was how I expected to feel after my first sessions generally. A little sore, but hardly crippled. Maybe it was just a fluke?
