5k Meeting with Doc

I've had several meeting with Doc this week about the Halloween Hustle.  The nursing students are hosting their own 5k that is taking place 2 weeks before the Halloween Hustle would have been, so we're not supposed to be doing our race.  Anyway, I've been meeting with Doc to figure out what he wants to do about the whole race situation.  GCANS wants us to help them out with the race with timing at the finish and whatnot, but we realized that their race is scheduled for the Saturday of fall break.  We were discussing the fact that they're not going to get nearly as many people there since most people will be going out of town.  Anyway, today, I met with some of the GCANS reps to see if they would consider postponing their race 2 weeks and joining in our race on October 24.  They said that they've already done too much advertising in the newspapers and radio stations that it would be difficult to reach everyone and tell them about the delay.  That being said, they're going to keep their race scheduled for the 10th and not worry about the number of people they have...we'll see how it turns up!

Men's Basketball - ropes

We've been watching the men's basketball team do the ropes with Brian and Doc once a week.  A lot of times, I'm not sure if the guys are just being lazy or if they are as tired as they act.  They make even the easy ropes seem like they're the hardest thing ever.  Their attitudes are awful sometimes, too.  I don't know what it is, but it just drives me nuts to watch these guys being lazy!  Oh well, maybe next time they'll be a little better... It's just irritating to watch college athletes slack off at something that's supposed to be improving their performance...you'd think they would want to get better.  Who knows!

Personal Training - Client 2

My personal training for client 2 has been going really well!  It's a little difficult to tell how much progress she's making, since we haven't weighed her lately and we didn't take any measurements.  I suppose since her goal is not necessarily weight loss, but moreso just toning up, we don't need to weigh her.  She appears to be getting stronger, and i think a lot of this has to do with neural adaptations since she doesn't typically do any kind of resistance training.  We've been able to gradually increase the weight that she's been using and she seems to be adapting to it very well.  She says that while she's doing certain exercises, her muscles feel very fatigued, but then she's never sore the next day.  This makes me think that she could be working a lot harder than she is right now, so I'm going to see if I can increase her weight a little more since it's been a few weeks and she should be pretty used to the exercises by now. 

We've been doing a lot of our cardio outside.  I have her wear my heart rate monitor when we run outside and it's been really good to be able to see what her heart rate is at a certain time.  I've definitely noticed that with her, running outside is a LOT harder than running inside.  I believe that this is true for everyone, but inside, she can run at 6mph with 0 incline for 20 minutes and her heart rate doesn't ever go above 160 or so, but outside, her heart rate gets up to 175 or so sometimes.  With her being an ex soccer player, she has pretty good respiratory endurance.

I've really enjoyed doing weights with her because I can tell that she really wants to learn how to do different exercises properly.  She's pretty motivated to get toned up which makes things a lot easier!  Every time I introduce a new exercise to her, she's pretty eager to try it out.  We added a tricep exercise this week and she's loving it.  She says that she feels like doing these arm exercises will definitely help her arms tone up!

Personal Training - client 1

Well, we weighed client 1 in on Thursday and were not too happy with the results.  My client appears to have gained 3 pounds since her last weigh in.  Obviously, this could be due to a lot of different factors.  Anyone's weight fluctuates a good bit throughout the day, so her "weight gain" could have been just a fluctuation of her actual weight.  Regardless of why it happened, I decided that in addition to the written food diary that my client has been keeping, she's going to get an account at www.livestrong.com and track her calories on the daily plate. 

I was very excited to see that when my client came in today for her training session, she had researched the amount of calories that she should be consuming on a day to day basis and even used a website to figure out how many they recommended she eat per day to lose 2 pounds a week.  She also had found a website that she could track her calories on, but we later determined that livestrong is a little more accurate and has a wider variety of brands of food and whatnot.  Anyway, it'll be very interesting to see how her calorie tracking goes.  Hopefully we can figure out how to get some weight off.  She would definitely benefit from a reduction in her weight. 

I've also changed her program a little.  We were doing about 30 minutes of cardio each session with about 30 minutes of weights.  Now, I've changed it to 40 minutes of cardio and 20 minutes of weights.  I think this will be a bit more helpful in our attempt to lose weight.  A lot of the cardio we do is pretty low intensity, but I'm working on increasing the speed and incline (with treadmill) and the RPMs for the bike.  Sometimes we do 3 minutes at 2.7 mph at 1.5% incline then 2 minutes at 3.2 mph at 1.5% incline and repeat that for about 20 minutes.  I can definitely see an improvement in her performance already. 

Club Meeting

We had our second club meeting this week.  We discussed what color our t-shirts will be as well as the calendar for this semester.  We finally got all of our events figured out.  I gave everyone a calendar of all the events, a list of times the seniors are training in the depot (so that juniors will know when to come shadow), and a list of junior-senior buddies.  These buddies were developed so that if a junior has a question about anything, they have a senior to go to.  They don't necessarily have to shadow this person, but they can if they'd like.  We also collected dues at this meeting.  We'll be ordering shirts very soon, so we had to get the money to put in the bank account.

Personal Training

This week, my clients and I did some pretty great workouts!  I felt really great about the programs I've been coming up with for them.  For my client that's trying to lose weight, I've come up with a lot of intermittent training things we can do.  Doc sent me some articles about intermittent training and how it can help obese populations lose more weight that interval training.   Basically, you exercise them until their heart rate reaches a certain point, then you stop until it decreases to a certain level, then start again.  It'll be interesting to see if this works for my client.  We've been getting in about 30-40 minutes of cardio each training session which is a big improvement.  I would like to see her push herself a little more though.  Sometimes she takes a break in the middle of part of my intemittent training.  Her food diary is looking a little rough.  I'm going to have to have a talk with her about nutrition.  We've talked about it before, but this time it'll have to be a little more intense, I think.  We're trying to keep track of her weight, but after this week, I think we're just going to record it every other week.  We've been recording it every week, but this week we saw a slight increase in weight.  I think part of this could be due to her diet, but I'm sure another part of it could be due to normal fluctuations in weight.  We'll see.  I just don't want to discourage her from working out.  She really is working hard and I really want to see it pay off.  We're trying to get 20 pounds off by December.  I'm going to make it happen...somehow.

Men's basketball

So today for basketball, the guys did the ropes.  We had 20 stations set up for them.  In between each station the guys had to run a lap around Centennial.  I haven't seen too many teams do it where they're running in between each station.  Anyway, Doc showed all the guys how to do the proper technique at each station, but we were there more or less to make sure they were doing it correctly.   A lot of the guys started to get pretty lazy towards the end.  I'm sure a lot of that is because they were tired, but their technique was getting pretty sloppy.  We are also starting to keep track of the numbers of waves the guys are making with certain ropes and the number of push ups and things like that.  Coach says that he wants to be able to tell who is working hard and who's slacking off.  It'll be interesting to see how this strategy works out.  I think it's good in theory, but it'll be hard to tell who is at the beginning of the circuit and who's at the end.

Men's basketball

Basketball training has been going very well.  The guys are getting more and more used to the different exercises and their form is getting better and better.  I definitely don't have to correct them on nearly as much as when they first began.  You can definitely tell, however, that their form on certain things like dead lift and anything with a squatting motion in it is a little rough.  This is fairly common with basketball players.  They are nearing the end of the neural introductory phase so it'll be interesting to see what their next workout looks like.  I would imagine it will be much more sport specific.  We'll just have to see though.

Personal Training

So Wednesday was my fitness test for one of my clients and my second training session with my other client.  Overall, the fitness test went very well.  This client is pretty athletic as is, so we're focusing mainly on getting a little more toned and back into shape.  My second training session was great also.  We did a lot of the same things that we did last time but added some squats with the exercise ball.  She seems to be adapting well to this program.  Already, I can tell that she seems to be a little more comfortable with the exercises and whatnot.  I've encouraged her to keep a log of everything that she eats and drinks so that we can take a look at what changes we can make to help her lose a little more weight. 

On Thursday we had our third meeting.  She brought in her log of food and we looked at it.  There are definitely some aread where we can cut back and consume fewer calories fairly easily.  She seems to enjoy sweet tea and sodas, so even just cutting out a few of those will help.  The exercise program seems to be going great.  She seems to be very motivated to work out pretty hard.  I'm really enjoying my time with her so far!

Personal Training

I now have two clients who I will be training throughout the semester.  My two clients are very opposite and have very different goals.  I started off with both by having a consultation and getting to know them a little and learn what their goals are for their time with a personal trainer.  One of the girls wants to establish a workout routine where she feels she is working hard.  She wants to get a little more toned up and get back to the level of fitness she used to be at.  My other client has a goal of weight loss.  

I have done a fitness test on one of them so far and am planning on doing the other fitness test next week sometime when she is feeling better.  My first fitness test went well and we learned that cardiovascular endurance is definitely something we need to be working on.  We had our first training session today.  We began with some cardio on the treadmill as well as the bike.  We then went into the weight room and did some free weight exercises.  A lot of the exercises I am doing with her utilize her body weight instead of dumbells.  We did a few leg exercises as well as some arm exercises.  We then went back to the cardio room and finished up with a little time on the stairmaster and finally a cooldown on the treadmill at a very slow speed.  

My primary goal this session was just to see what she could handle and see what her experience with resistance training was.  I had to make a few corrections on her form with some of the exercises, but overall, she seemed to be doing great!  I'm excited to see how our training sessions progress!  I'm planning on keeping track of everything we do so that I can see the improvement and show her directly so she can see some results.  We will be keeping track of her weight also by measuring it every Thursday.  I'll be interested to see how long it will take us to reach her weight loss goals!

Basketball Weight Training

This semester, I've been working with the men's basketball team here at GCSU.  They have their weight room workouts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Some of the exercise science majors have been going to the practices and helping them out with their form and technique of various exercises.  Right now they are in the neural introductory phase of training.  During this phase, they will be doing a lot of exercises that are a good introduction to the season.  All of these exercises will help the players to build a strong core and build up a base for some of the exercises they will be doing later.  It's been really interesting to watch how different the form is for each player.  Many of them complete the exercises with great form, but there are also a good number of them who do the exercises with substandard form.  It's our job to help correct these errors and keep the players from getting injured from bad form execution.  It'll be interesting to see the improvements that all of the players make throughout the year.  I've enjoyed helping them out so far and am very excited to see how things go!