Gym Check-up

Whew! We've been sooo busy since I last posted Wednesday. Thursday we had dinner with family, Friday we attended a friend's birthday party, and Saturday we went to a friend's housewarming. Today we ran some errands and I'm relaxing at home this evening (yay no plans!). It looks like our busy trend will continue into next week. Tomorrow we are having dinner with friends, Tuesday I'm going snowshoeing and out with my work, Wednesday we are having friends over for game night, and Friday we are meeting my parents for dinner. Whew, that's a LOT of eating out. Maintaining my weight is soooo much hard when I have to eat out socially. Oh well, I'm trying to keep the indulging under control and just make it through this crazy period.

I had an appointment with a trainer at the gym this morning and got a "check-up" as well as a program refresh. Last time I met with this trainer was back in June. Here is a comparison of my stats then and this morning:

                        June, 2011                                  March, 2012
Weight:             155.6 lb                                       145.8 lb
% Body Fat:      31.9%                                         30.3%
lbs Fat Mass:     49.6                                             44.2
lbs Lean Mass:   106                                              101.6

So I've lost 10 lbs since my last appointment, including 5 lbs each of fat and muscle (obviously, it's not great to be losing muscle, but it happens). Now that I'm at a happy weight I really just want to focusing on converting some fat into muscle. Ideally, I'd like my body fat to be a little lower, maybe 28% or so. I also talked to the trainer about the strength training I'm doing, to try and make sure I'm targeting all my muscle groups. Now that I'm going to the gym at least 4 times a week, she suggested I do a striated workout where I focus on certain body parts each day.

Each time I go to the gym I want to workout for about 1 hour, broken into 30 min cardio and 30 min strength training (this is a more strength training and less cardio than I'm doing right now). Here are the days and exercises my trainer suggested.

Strength workout A: Chest/Back/Core
Lat pull-downs (back)
Seated row (back)
Pullovers (back/chest)
Chest press (chest)
Assisted chin-ups (upper body)
Crunches (core)
Bicycle crunches (core)
Plank (core)


Strength workout B: Shoulders/Arms/Legs
Shoulder press (shoulders)
Side shoulder raise (shoulders)
Tricep press (triceps)
Bicep curls (biceps)
Leg extension (quads)
Leg curl (hams)
Calf raises (calves)
Squats (glutes)
One leg glut lifts (glutes)


Each day I'll use the foam roller on my legs/butt to help with my IT band problems.

I'm going to try out these two workouts doing 3 sets of each exercise, 8-12 reps each, and see how long this takes. As I said, I want this to be about 30 min total, so we'll see how it goes - this might be too many exercises for 30 min! I plan to go to the gym 4 times a week, so I'd do program A twice, and program B twice each week. I'm going to do pretty heavy weights to build a little more muscle and then I just want to maintain it. I already am starting to see some definition but I wouldn't mind a little more!!

I'm not going to be too rigid and just use this as a guideline. There might be days when I want to do a class or something to change things up!!

If anyone has any suggestions on this program please leave me a note in the comments!