2007 a New Year, New Beginnings

Yesterday I had my fitness assessment at the gym. This is where you go in and they weigh you, measure you, test your vital signs, stregth, flexibility, and aerobic ability. Then, they take all this data and put it into a fancy computer program in order to tell you about you!

So, I show up for my assessment after a 12 hour work shift, only to find that I have a young, cute trainer named John. He starts with my vitals. Here is where I was actually happy. My blood pressure was 114/68, pulse 72, respiratory rate 16 and pulse ox of 98%. He says..."your pulse rate is slightly elevated and your blood pressure isn't too bad" What?? I thought that was pretty good considering I'm overweight, a recent ex-smoker, and just worked 12 hours! Also, normal pulse rate is from 60-100 and we don't worry about blood pressure until it's 130/80 depending on risk factors. I was a little perturbed that! I've since talked with a couple of my co-workers...nurses and docs and figured out that I was right, my vitals were just fine!!! So, next is on to the aerobic ability test. This is 5 minutes on the treadmill at a rate of 3.5, the first minute is at no incline, then they have it move to a 5% incline for the remaining four minutes. While I'm chugging away on the treadmill, they ask you to rate how tired you are on a scale from 1-10. 10 being you're so tired you're ready to collapse. I managed to stay in the less than 5 range for the entire test. Next is the fabulous sit and reach test. Now, I've never been very flexible, for as long as I can remeber!!! So, I sit down with my feet against the box and I push the little tab, I think the number I reached was 13. I think this is inches and yes again....not flexible at all!!! Oh well, more to work on. Next was the strength test. I had to do pushups. I did 14, but only 10 of them counted because my form wasnt' very good. He asked if I could do more, but I quickly informed him no....as I could feel my back buckling and my form going to crap. I figured I wouldn't be able to push myself back off the floor if I got all the way down again! Finally I step on the scale and they enter my weight, height, then this fabulous machine measures out your body fat percentage....in my case it screamed...."get off you big fatty fatterton!!! Only one on the scale at one time!!!!" Ok, not really, but thats what I felt like. Now I go back to the gym on Saturday morning for a meeting with John again. He's going to put me through the motions of my workout designed just for me! He already forwarned me that it was going to involve a lot of cardio in order to bring down my body fat. I was strong, but needed to lose the excessive fat. A feat mainly obtained by a lot of cardio work and not a lot of lifting! So....we'll see

I've also joined my own biggest loser campaign with my family. I have three months to reach my first goal. What better motivation then fellow family members, and money??? Now, I wanted to attempt to run the shamrock shuffle at the end of March. This is a 5mile run. I now have come to the realization that I will most likely not be in shape for this run, but I'll probably head down to the city to cheer on my fellow family members who are able to do the run!!! We'll see, maybe I'll do a late sign up, depending on how fast I get my booty in shape!!!! I have hopes to get myself in shape and lose a lot of this excessive weight.