Personal Training NYC -Client H

Over the Thanksgiving holidays my husband was looking through a book on dumbbell exercises. He found interested in the “wall squat” or “wall sit”. To do this exercise, you position back against a flat wall and slide down until you look like you are sitting in a straight back chair. The object is stay there for a couple of minutes.

My husband decided we would have a little contest to see who would last the longest. While the book mentioned holding dumbells during the exercise, we decided to keep it simple and stick with body weight. We were outside in the drive way to our house where there is a nice brick wall, perfect for this. My husband went first. He is in pretty good shape (runs, bicycles 20+ miles, weights, etc.).He was feeling pretty confident he could out sit me. After sitting 10 seconds, he started laughing.. the kind of laugh you make when you realize you misjudged something. 15 seconds and his legs were quivering.. 20 seconds he was breaking a sweat and at 25 seconds he was finished.

So now it was my turn to sit. I got in position and we started the timer. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t feel the immediate discomfort my husband had experienced. 15 seconds and I’m still comfortable.. 20 seconds no problems. Then at 25 seconds, my little Westie looked at me and decided to seize the opportunity before him.. “LAP!!” By the time I reached 30 seconds my little doggie was sitting comfortably in my lap enjoying the night! I didn’t let this stop me. It was almost 2 minutes and my legs were beginning to shake. I wanted to let my husband think that I could last a lot longer, so I casually said “This is boring, I don’t want to do it anymore.” And I started to stand up.. but now my Westie isn’t ready to de-lap! My legs are quivering and I’m trying to gracefully stand-up.. but he won’t budge!! It was hillarious. I was about to fall flat on the ground when my doggie decided it may not be safe to stay where he was. He hopped down and I was able to save face… and I lasted 2 minutes with the added 18 pounds!!

I was up again at 5am. Ate two scrambled eggs with one slice of toast (I put a tiny bit of grape jelly on the toast).

I had the kitchen clean and started my workout by 6am. I worked out my lower body today. I added some wrist/ankle weights for some of the exercises, but they are so light weight they don’t really count (1.5 lb each). The entire workout lasted 1 hour and 10 minutes (minus the cool down). I haven’t been very good about cool downs. But this week I’m using the tread-climber in treadmill mode and it is amazing the difference. I’m doing a more normal jogging action and I can feel my calves tightening. In normal tread-climber mode, the action is more like walking up a hill.

Another cool observation.. when I was stretching Monday after my workout.. I saw a new muscle!! It’s in the inner thigh. I think it’s the adductors. It’s really funny.. it looks like I’m wearing a pair of twisted panty hose. Of course, it only looks like that when I’m stretching, but I’ve never seen muscles in my inner thighs before.