Day 45: A day of learning

This is a photo from the shoot Moira did yesterday.  You can click on the photo to go to the photographer’s Model Mayhem account.

Today Moira and I had appointments with folks at the YMCA to learn how to use the weight equipment  – or at least that’s what I thought I had an appointment to do.  It turned out I had a much more wonderful appointment set up than I’d realized.  I met with EJ at 9 am and spent the next two hours talking about my goals (controlling high blood pressure and pre-diabetes with exercise/diet rather than medications now that I’m uninsured) and how to best work toward meeting them.

Cardio: EJ helped me determine what settings I should use on the treadmill (start with no incline, 2.8 mph for 30 min with a 5 min warm-up before and 5-min cool down after, adding 5 min a week until I hit an hour).  We looked at the elliptical trainer that I usually use -and he showed me that it has been on a pretty high incline when I start even though I didn’t know it!  With the incline set to 0 this is an exercise I could do while being able to control my heart rate.  Wow!  That was a real eye opener.

Weights: EJ then showed me how to use four of the eleven pieces of weight equipment they have (we have another appointment on Friday to teach me to use other pieces).

Stretches: We finished up with a full body stretch.   One of the tools we used from streching was the Procor Stretch Trainer.  I actually really liked this tool – even though it felt like I’d be tumbling backwards any second now.  I didn’t know there were “machines” you could use to help you stretch!

I’m definitely feeling my workout this evening, but look forward to doing it all again tomorrow.  I never did like that my physician put me immediately on medications for my border-line hypertension, and pre-diabetes.  Now I’m going to figure out how to reverse both without meds.