Ready for Another Week

Thursday, March 29, 2012 8:59 PM

Alright, so today's session was definitely tough, but it was fun! Nicole busted out the kick-boxing exercises! Not only did she do the techniques, she also let her lil "Bob from Biggest Loser" come out! She had me imagining her face as I attempted to punch the crap out of the target! I have to say, imagining her face wasn't really motivating me, so I used a different technique to get me going...I just put all of my focus on changing my body. I know that's not as motivating for some people, but for me, CHANGE is a big motivating factor! But I could just lie and say that I was imagining Bin Laden's ugly-ass mug!

We started out the session with arm warm-ups, Nicole totally wanted to confuse/shock my muscles, so she had me doing all new arm warm-ups. We did all sorts of new things, like stretching the arms forward and switching them off up and down, placing the arms in front of the face, bent elbows, and bringing arms out n' in, and lots of other stuff that BURNED!

Then Nicole brought out an inflatable punching "target," and had me punching forward, once with the left fist/arm and twice with the right. Then she had me switch---once with the right, twice with the left. She also had me doing upper-cuts. On each side she had me punching my fist upwards, all the while shouting to "punch harder!" and "faster!"

Next, we took a break from Fight Club ;) and Nicole handed me the weights. I did biceps curls repetitively then I raised the weights out and up from my sides with straight arms. Nicole has had me do these before, but I don't think I've had to do such long repetitions before! My arms were killin' me, but loving Nicole didn't seem to mind!

As I sat in my wheelchair, catching my breath and feeling the sweat build up under my sweatshirt, Nicole smiled and said, "We're gonna try to have you do something similar to push-ups." Initially I was skeptical, but as Nicole described how we were going to do it, I felt silly for my initial skepticism. We made it work like this: Nicole held up a flat surface in front of me, I placed my hands on either side, and as I pushed my elbows out straight, she pushed with her entire body-weight back against my arms. Make sense? Man, the effort put in by both her and I was definitely intense! We were both out of breath after those!

After a short break for both of us, Nicole grabbed like a 5' pole and had me pull in towards my chest, as she put resistance on the pole. We did this on each arm, then we tried pull-ups. Nicole held the pole above my head, with I can only assume was all her strength. and I pulled vigorously down, at times lifting my butt off the wheelchair.

Lastly, Nicole was my hand-masseuse! She decided that my right hand needed to be massaged cuz it's super tight and my thumb is always bent and in...again, make sense? So, as most would expect, I was excited for a nice, relaxing massage. But Nicole found the most painful spot to rub! The good news is, it relaxed and opened-up my thumb! 

This session felt really good and I'm excited to see what Nicole comes up with next week!