Good evening 🙂

At the point where he handed me a 20 kg kettle bell, I asked Matt the Trainer if he was trying to kill me. He replied that he was, but in a good way…

this was near the end of the session. It is a really big kettle bell too…much bigger than the 8 kg one I normally use. In the picture the 8 kg one is the little green one, right at the back, sitting looking all tiny in comparison! There was method in his madness, and I was all my own fault really because when asked “could you go heavier?” while I was holding a 12 kg one, I answered “probably” anyone with any sense would have said no! The 20 kg kettle bell symbolises what today’s personal training was all about, which was a two fold goal as far as I could tell. The first goal being to make things as hard as possible for me and the second being to focus really hard on the correct technique and some new training methods. Apparently I was being used as a guinea pig for some training techniques for training athletes the Matt learned on a course he went on last week. I quite like this, it makes my training sessions interesting.

We started with a warm up, which was not too scary, and went on to mobility exercises, to warm up joints and such like. There was an element of multitasking here as Matt the trainer was putting on my hand wraps at the same time (on me…not on him that would be silly).

We did a lot of the same basic types of exercises that we normally do, thai boxing and MMA, ViPRS, TRX kettlebells, cardio, all done with the slight differences. The Thai Boxing for example we worked on closer in work, Matt not letting me come forward as much as normal when working so I had to work on my distance and technique. We focused a lot on technique, making sure I got each bit right as well as fast and powerful. This was true of defense drill as well as attack drills. It was considerably more tricky than you might think! Cardio was in the form of 1 min easy, 1 min as fast and with as much energy as I could possibly manage. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was REALLY hard work, especially as the cardio machine of choice was the rowing machine! This worked very well as a heartrate raining exercise in the middle of the session.

Other exercises were done slower and again with more focus on perfect technique, and slightly different techniques to normal to work muscles in different ways. For example squats, done with concentration on pushing legs apart while they are carried out and squeezing glutes on the way up. The ViPR exercises were done very slowly, threading the needle, with the twist of the ViPR to change direction done at shoulder height and slowly. This really concentrated on core as well as arms and shoulders (and legs).

and the point of the very heavy kettlebell? well it was supposed to stop me using my arms to propel the kettle bell during the swing. The swing should be propelled by the hips snap and the shoulders should be pushed back not arching forward. Again this was an excellent exercise, but made the whole thing considerably harder!

an excellent, but very hard work day 74 complete 😀