A month back I was awarded a free session with a personal trainer for showing up twice a week at the gym for 12 consecutive weeks. Not very difficult to achieve seeing that I normally exercise 5 times a week. And so today I had a one hour long session with one of the personal trainers there at the gym.

And it was quite an interesting chat. It was nice first of all to have the conclusions I’ve come to on my own verified by a professional. I also got some answers to practical questions I had. I must say she gave a very professional impression on me. She managed to squeeze out quite a lot of information about my exercise habits and needs in a very short time. She showed me how some of the exercise machines worked as the once they have there at S.A.T.S. Jakobsberg are different from the once at my previous gym. She also gave me some tips about nutritional supplements. All good stuff. The only negative was that she spent a lot of time trying to sell me more PT-sessions. I guess it’s to be expected when you get something for free…

The main conclusion was that I should try to get more strength training into my schedule. Seeing that the various forms of group training that I do is very focused on the lower half of the body, I will start out by focusing on my upper body strength.

My only problem with weight lifting is that there are no set times or classes for it that you need to book in advance. When I’m booked to a group training session it becomes trivial to get my lazy ass to the gym due to the very fact that if I’m not there on time I will loose my spot and not get any training for the day. A meeting booking in my calendar is a binding contract in my mind, but anything that is not in there is flexible to the point that it can be skipped all together. In engineering we call this time-management :P So to start out with I will probably hook it up so that I’ll book myself on a 30 minute spinning session when I want to do my weight lifting, thus getting a trainer instructed warm-up as an added bonus!

The most interesting thing about the session however, was what happened when I was trying one of the machines where you do an overhead shoulder press. I noticed that my shoulders “snapped” at both the top and bottom end of the motion, something which I have noticed before when doing similar exercises in for instance Body Pump class, but this was quite painful. She asked me if I had had any injuries in my past. And that’s when I figured I’d show her how far I could extend my shoulders and to my surprise she told me this was not normal. It’s funny how I have always known that I am more flexible in my shoulders than most people, but I have always thought of it as a sort of bonus. Because flexibility is good right? But she told me she didn’t know what to recommend that I would do about it since the shoulder is not “supposed to” be able extend as far back as mine does. At least I’m aware of it now so I can be mindful about it.

So all in all it was a very good session, I learned something about myself and got some good advice. I can definitely see the usefulness of PT-sessions, and I think I will buy some more sessions, though not in the immediate future.