Made It To The Gym

I said it, and I've done it. I made it back to the gym. After work yesterday, I met up with my brother at Planet Fitness and signed him up for a membership. I originally planned on taking him through a light CTAL workout, but he opted to just workout on a treadmill instead. After showing him the treadmills and checking his heart rate, I agreed with his decision. He might not be ready for weights yet.

I wanted to take it easy and only wanted to work out for thirty minutes. So I headed over to Planet Fitness's 30-minute Express Workout Area. What they have is 20 stations and a red-green traffic light. The light cycles green for 60 seconds and red for 30 seconds. So you start at any number station and work your way around in order until you wind up at the number you started. If you follow the lights, this will last you for 30 minutes. Some people say this workout isn't challenging enough, but I think the level of intensity for any workout is dependent on how much the user wants to workout.

The way the stations are broken up, there are 10 weight machines and 10 stepping blocks in the middle of the area for use between weight machines. Weight machines and their respective station number follows:

2. Leg press

4. Leg curls

6. Leg extensions

8. Chest press

10. Shoulder press

12. Lat pulldown

14. Seated row

16. Biceps curl

18. Triceps

20. Ab curl

I started on station #1, which was a stepping block. I didn't really feel like doing stepping exercises, so I decided to mix it up whenever I reached one of these stations. For the first one, I did jumping jacks for a minute. The next time I did jump rope hops. I also did lateral hops, ski twisting hops, kung fu horse stance, and kung fu golden chicken stance (left and right). Let's say by the end of this workout, my legs felt jelly-like.

With the mini cardio sessions in between the single sets of weight exercises, it was a pretty good workout. Intensity level pretty much stayed the same except for the 30-second rests in between. I think it's a pretty good workout if you're in a rush and don't want to think your way through a workout. However, if you are building or cutting, you really need 2-4 sets of a weight exercise to get the optimal benefit.

All-in-all, though, it was a good first day. So I'm looking forward to keeping this up. It's good to start to get back into the swing of things. I'm also hoping my brother will keep this workout thing going. I can't wait to eventually lift with him.