My First Personal Trainer Session

So as I mentioned before, Active Newport have given me a free 2 week membership with them, to try out their facilities, classes and a few personal trainer sessions. My first personal trainer session was on Thursday night, here’s how it went:

I arrived at the gym at 6.30pm ready for my session. I was really nervous having not done anything like this before. I was worried they would expect too much from me or push me too hard. I was also pretty excited about it too. My induction with Pure Gym was pretty poor to be honest and although they did offer me a free personal trainer session when I first joined I didn’t feel I was ready at the time to take them up on it. This means that I have never learnt how to use the machines properly and get most of my guidance and workout ideas from the internet. The chance to work with a personal trainer meant I was going to learn the right workouts to do to achieve my goals.

So I arrived at Newport Veledrome for my session and met with Miyazim who would be my personal trainer for the next hour. He was really friendly and asked me what my goals were so I explained to him that I wanted to get fitter and lose a bit of weight. He asked which areas I wanted to focus on the most so I said my arms and stomach as they are definitely my problem areas.

We did a quick warm up on the treadmill which consisted of increasing the speed every minute until I was running at 11km an hour, and decreasing it back down, I was definitely feeling warm by the end of that. Then Miyazim asked me if I had done any boxing before which I hadn’t. He led me over to the punch bag and explained we would be doing sets of 30 seconds of punching on the bag and 30 seconds of jumping jacks. And we would be doing this 7 times!! After the first 3 times we changed the jumping jacks to Burpees, and the last round consisted of 1 min of punching and 1 min of burpees and 2 jumping jacks straight after.

The first round was fine. It felt great to be let loose on the punch bag; it really is a great stress reliever! The jumping jacks were a good way to break it up and seemed to come at just the right time as my arms were getting tired. The 2^nd and 3^rd rounds were ok too but my arms were definitely starting to feel tired from all the punching, 30 seconds feels so much longer than it sounds.

Then we moved onto the round with burpees. I find burpees hard enough at the best of times but with boxing gloves on they were even harder! I really struggled with them and by the 6^th round I could barely jump my legs away from my body, definitely one to work on! The last round was ridiculously hard. Miyazim was so encouraging but all my strength had disappeared. I struggled with the punching and the burpees and jumping jacks were nearly impossible, I think I managed about 4 within the minute.

We moved onto the rowing machine and did a HIIT style workout. This consisted of 1 min of slow rowing and then 30 seconds of rowing as fast as you can. We repeated this for 15 minutes (I think, it could have been 10 mins, it felt like an hour!) I do something pretty similar in the gym myself already so I was pleased to see this was something a PT would recommend to do. It was great being shown by Miyazim the correct form and he showed me what numbers I should be looking out for on the display of the machine. He explained that during the 30 seconds of powerful rowing I should keep it above 710, which sometimes I found easy and sometimes I found hard. During one 30 second round I hit over 780 which I was really impressed with but the next one I struggled to get over 680 so it’s definitely something I need to work on.  (I have no idea what these numbers relate to, just that they are what I should be looking for!)

After this we used the Lat pull down machine. Miyazim explained that for my goal of toning up my arms it was best to use light weights with more repetitions, something that I have heard before and try to take on board during a workout. Again he showed me how to correct my form and how to use the machine properly which was great, you know when you’re doing it right because you can feel it working the correct muscles.

We finished with some ab work. I was glad we went through this as this is something I never do when I am at the gym. I usually stick to the machines and rarely venture into the free weight section, mostly because when I get there I don’t really know what to do, or in my gym its always busy so you can never get a space.

We did a set of crunches while holding a kettle bell in the air, then a set of keeping my legs straight but bringing them up to meet my arms and the last set was Russian twists. I find Russian twists so hard to do; I can never get my feet off the ground so this really is a move I need to work at. The kettle bell was a bit heavy (it was 6kg, I usually use a 4!) so we switched to a dumbbell instead. The Velodrome has a great selection of dumbbells, medicine balls and kettle bells so there were plenty of weights to choose from. We did these exercises in repetitions of 16 I think and repeated the whole set 3 times. By the end of the sets my stomach was really feeling it.

We headed back to the treadmill for a cool down which was made up of jogging for a few minutes and doing some leg stretches. Miyazim also showed me how to use the vibrating plate to help with my stretches which was fab as I’ve always been curious of that machine but too scared to try it. We did a hamstring stretch on there and then that was it, the session was over!

Throughout the whole session Miyazim was really encouraging and supportive. It was so great to train with someone who knows exactly what they are doing. He pushed me pretty hard, much harder than I would ever push myself in the gym. He also explained everything we were doing and how it would help me. He gave me some good tips on using HIIT workouts and how important active rest is. Learning to use the punch bag was great fun and that’s a piece of equipment my current gym doesn’t have. I’m really looking forward to getting back in the gym next week to try this workout again on my own. My cousin Tara (read her blog here, it’s awesome!) is also a member of this gym so I think the punch bag routine would be a good thing for us to do together.

Have you ever had a personal training session or a plan put together for you, or have you worked it all out for yourself? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

Tasha xx