Thursday, July 24, 2008

Personal Trainer - Core and Back Exercises

This morning I met with Dave - a personal trainer at Fitness First.  As I had mentioned before, the personal trainer services are included in the membership fees (I'm sure there is some limit as to how many sessions you can schedule, but since I'm not going to be in the gym everyday I'm not going to worry about it).

A few years ago, when I had joined Fitness First the first time, the personal trainer pretty much gave me a weight circuit to do.  It was as generic as you could get - or at least that is how I felt about it.  I was going to have none of that this time around.  When I requested to meet with a trainer this time around I said that I wanted to work on core strength and flexibility.

One of the first things that Dave said to me was that he really doesn't like using all of the machines...he believes in "free form" training.  Hallelujah!

Of course that did not mean it was going to be easy...

The exercises that I did included crunches (with legs up in the air), reverse crunches, side planks, seated twists with dumbbells, dumbbell rows, push-ups on dumbbells adding a single arm row after each push-up, back extensions, a few back exercises with the exercise band and two different plank exercises.  I think that's all of them, but I may have missed one.  It was a good abs workout - but more importantly a great back workout.  I felt muscles in my back that I didn't know existed!  Assuming I continue to do these a few times a week, my back muscles will get stronger and I'm sure that I'll get a better workout in my abs as well.

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