Category: Cross training

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Exercising those big L muscles

It was back to Denise’s Dolphin Circuits Class tonight, with seemingly even more people than last week and certainly more whose names I knew.  Last Tuesday I sat down right next to Sharon, a lady at an event I was attending, who said that she had followed me around the circuits class the night before!

There seemed to be more activities tonight too, but there were actually 18 last week as well… it’s just that we couldn’t remember what the missing activity was (oblique curls, of course).

I almost joined the two affable guys (who turned out to be Tony & Lee) who Daryl and I had followed round last week, but at the last moment I joined Daryl and new guy (to me) Al on the basis that I could then more easily bridge the gap between the two groups and have a little fun with all four of them… it felt a little like being in the back row at school at times, so a pretty good choice then!

Kim was working her way around on the opposite side of the hall and we kept exchanging Wallace & Gromit grins through various levels of pain, while Sharon and her friends generally had more serious looks on their faces!

Overall though, thanks to the guys in the naughty corner, my laughter muscles got such a great workout that I might even find it difficult to pull a smile tomorrow!

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Going round in circles again

After last week’s re-acquaintance with circuit training, and with the whole-body aching which chased it through the days that followed, Kim and I returned for a further endorphin rush last night.

The Burgess Hill session was fully booked so we took our custom to the Dolphin in Haywards Heath where the trainer, Denise, had assembled a veritable torture chamber of activities… 17 in all.

The warm-up alone had me gasping for air but with a group of around 37 people we were left a little to our own devices on the activities themselves, so I was able to decide my own limits.

Thankfully I was also able to copy my training partner for the evening, Daryl, otherwise I would still be working out the exercises now.

I say copy, but in fact he chose double the amount of weight than I did each time… strange that!

Overall a great workout!  Probably not as hard-core as Burgess Hill, though maybe that’s because I actually re inflated some old, forgotten muscles last week!

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OMG!

Back in the time of the prosperous, when Kim and I both had London jobs and London flats and escaped to Sussex at the weekends, we each had a personal trainer too.  In fact I would go to the gym in London Bridge at least twice or three times a week and it would be fair to say that I was pretty fit.

Then I had a fairly nasty head-on skiing accident, which resulted in a broken collar bone and a major break in the gym routine, followed by a halo jump in income, which as any parachuter knows means high altitude, low opening!  Both Kim and I chose to start afresh, sell out of London and follow our genuine long-term interests rather than to work back up to the top of an industry we no longer felt passion for.

Which is why, since (before) the outset of this blog in August 2007, you will have seen very little written in these pages about any exercise other than running.

So it came as a bit of a shock to the body to go to a Circuit Training class last night!  One hour with (bluddy) Jane at the Triangle Centre pushed a fine selection of muscle groups to their absolute limit…and clearly beyond since I actually HAD to stop to rest from time to time.

It was an excellent class, broken up into a series of simple paired exercises using no more than a floor mat and a skipping rope.  Oh, and the slowly increasing weight of our own limbs.

It was so excellent, in fact, that it’s fully booked for the foreseeable future!  RATS!

However, the Endorphin drug has been re-tasted and Kim is now on a mission to find us another local activity, with a similarly diverse and good natured group of people, that can leave us feeling similarly pumped-up on a more regular basis.

Watch this space, but in the meantime, OMG!, I feel GOOD!