Girl Meets Trainer

Yesterday was my first personal training session with Rob Miller, M's friend who's training us at Chicago Fitness Center.

I had been dreading the session all day. I'd never been to a personal trainer and I'd heard stories about puking, passing out, being screamed at... all the general horror stories. So OF COURSE I was freaking out on my way to the gym and completely expecting the worse.

Turns out that while Rob is physically intimidating, he's actually a cool guy. Since it was our first session, we talked for about 15 minutes about why I wanted to start training (I'm 30 and need to lose my fat suit), what I'd been eating (crap, obviously) and how the diet was going (it sucks). He had some good insight on why America is overweight... we fall into eating 3 big meals a day and lots of fast food and processed foods because that's what we're taught in school and what the media markets to us. While it's mostly my fault I'm fat, there are some obvious problems with how people view food because of how it is advertised to us.

So on to the training session. Rob's main goal for the first session was to assess our fitness level and see how we move so he can develop a training program to suit M and me. Our workout consisted of circuit training with some weights, some arm and ab work, leg lifts and squats... the usual. He also had us carrying huge weights around the track, which was undoubtedly the most challenging part of the workout.

What I learned:
1. I'm WAY out of shape. But that will change with Rob's guidance.
2. I apparently have no upper body strength.
3. Planks are evil.

I sweat a lot, but it wasn't as horrifying as I thought it would be. Training is actually kind of fun. I'm sore today, but not in too much pain. My quads (from all those squats) and arms (from the see-saw arm weight moves) hurt the most.

We have our next session on Friday. In the meantime, Rob is going to email me workouts for the days we don't have training sessions. It'll be nice to mix it up.