Last week marked the first week of personal training for me. Health has been such a huge aspect of my life and it’s been something that I’ve been in pursuit of for some time.
Over the years, I’ve tried dieting, researching into better health, and have also taken some health challenges along the way. But one other area that I haven’t bothered to get into is having a personal trainer.
Part of that being the fact they are so expensive to hire.
Fortunately, my business has grown to the point that I can accommodate personal training into my life and begin to make significant changes in my health life. As a result, I want to be taking time every week to reflect on my efforts towards improving my health.
I also want to be offering more in terms of this series since I can tell you now, the meals that I’m having aren’t unique at all. And they will get repetitive if I’m to take shots of them.
More on that in a bit.
Instead, I want this series to focus even more on the journey. And since I’ve been working on my Youtube channel, I’d like to incorporate those videos in this series as well.
So here is the start of my journey, and my progress thus far.
Why Personal Training?
Before getting too far into this, I’d like to explain why I’m going into personal training. It’ll provide a nice refresher for those who have followed my journey a little, but also anyone else who happens to read this.
As I mentioned before, health has been a huge part of my life. In particular, my body image has been pretty important. The fact that I’m obese played into many aspects of my life.
It’s part of what led me to depression when I was a teen.
It was also part of my reason for not dating people and to a degree impacted my social skills. The depression as well as internet addiction also fed into social insecurity and more.
While I’m still not happy with my figure today, I want to be taking better care of myself. I’m getting older and while health problems aren’t an issue right now, I’m a few decades away from running into more severe ones.
Unless I make an effort to start changing my ways soon.
Improving my health has been an ongoing theme for about seven years now. I’ve lost weight, only to gain it back and make it worse. As I’ve said, I’ve tried all kinds of things from working out at home to eating better and more.
Fortunately, a lot of my healthy eating habits have been sticking. Now even more since I’ve moved out of my parent’s house.
So the real issue is building up muscle and burning that fat away.
This is where personal training comes in. I’ve hired a personal trainer to help me out with ironing out the tinier details of my eating but also to put me on a training regimen that’s tailored for me.
Not only that, but this provides me with a good incentive to keep going to the gym. After all, the membership is pretty cheap and is inconsequential to most people. Adding in personal training though and it’s a rude wake-up call financially.
So not only does this personal training push me in my health, but it also adds another big expense that pushes me to grow my business further. In my book, that’s a win-win so long as I leverage it.
Pair that up with me having a deep personal reason and this is why it makes so much sense for me to have this.
Related: The Road To Better Health
So What’s Happened With Personal Training?
How I’ll break these articles moving forward is in two ways: first I’ll talk about the training itself followed by my own experiences.
I say this because I feel that nutrition isn’t the core focus here. Don’t get me wrong though, if you want to be losing weight, a lot of it comes down to what’s going on outside of the kitchen.
And I feel I’ll be mentioning it throughout these posts anyway.
But the other thing is that my meals are not going to be unique or different from week to week. Every week I’m more or less having the same meal.
There will be some variances, but not that many where I can show you appealing calorie-wise meals.
Breakfast I’m having toast, cereal/eggs/or oatmeal, and a piece of fruit.
Lunch is a tuna sandwich with some veggies.
Supper is chicken (or some other protein), veggies, and rice.
What is going to be different though and what is happening is the growth in my overall health and muscles.
The Progress
In terms of my weight, it hasn’t really changed that much. To this point, the regimen I’m on has got me winded, but not necessarily sweating a whole lot at the gym.
That’s not a testament to how poor my personal trainer is though. If you’re looking to lose weight specifically, it’s not something that happens overnight.
Normally if you want fast results, you’ll need to change your exercising plus your diet drastically. I know this because a few years ago I took a health challenge that focused on circuit-based exercises and had a very restrictive meal plan. I lost 21 pounds in six weeks which is unnatural for people.
According to the Mayo Clinic, natural weight loss for people is 2 pounds per week. In the challenge, I lost an average of 3.5 pounds per week.
With this in mind, the past few weeks with my personal trainer have been learning the ropes of exercises and where I should be feeling when doing specific movements.
Not only that but I’ve also learned how my body compensates. This means shrugging when lifting weight or arching my back when I shouldn’t be. My trainer has been good about pointing that out. This has helped me notice when I’m compensating and to make adjustments.
I’m at a stage where the easier movement exercises are in good form. For the most part.
Furthermore, I’ve been asked to do specific stretches at home which have pushed me further. With each passing day, my feet have gotten stronger because of the stretches I’m doing.
The Feels Of Personal Training
Despite my weight loss progress being non-existent at the moment, I’m being patient with this. I’m on this program for an entire year and I’ve noticed some changes.
With this in mind, the trainers at the gym I’m going to are different than what I’ve experienced in the past. It’s not about losing as much weight as possible in a certain time frame like the challenge I took.
This is about steady progress and making adjustments when need be.
My goal for the end of this week is to start dipping into my weight a little bit and to lose a pound. It’s a reasonable goal to work on now since I’ve managed to get most of the exercises down in terms of form and where I should be feeling it.
The personal training is pushing me every single day and every day I feel stronger. I’ve noticed my walks to the gym every day being easier and I don’t feel as strained when walking.
These are all small changes but over time, I’ll start to notice more differences. Not just on the inside, but the outside too.
The Road To Health
One thing I’ve learned about health is that there is no single way to improving your health. Wherever you look, there are studies that prove and disprove certain methods. Whatever the case is, it’s important that you consider what is best for you. For some people, they might toss in personal training with IV therapy. Others might go my route and focus on usual exercising, eating healthy, and maybe writing in a journal (public or not).
No matter the case, what I always suggest with health is this:
Follow the path that ensures you feel good during the process.
That is what matters. Because if you’re not loving what you’re doing, you’ll stop doing it. So make sure what you are doing is what is good for you and works with you.
To your growth!
Eric S Burdon
Most genuine information , no promotion of products all natural ….super helpful knowledge i really appreciate your help👏👏👏👏
Glad that it could help you out Stanley! 🙂