Good afternoon people, I must apologise for my recent apparent reclusive behaviour and disappearance from blogland, but I have been snowed under with study in preparation for my Level 3 Personal trainer workshop which a) involved an advanced anatomy and physiology exam, and 2) took place this weekend 🙂

when I say snowed under…I am not lying…I really was, but I did take a tiny all day break on wednesday to let a man draw on my arm with needles!!

This was the result…

Itl looks better than that now, as it has healed a lot and this is only the first sitting, there are going to be two more in which there will be more shading and it will continue further down my arm with more biomechanical awesomeness!

for biomechanical, think HR Giger…

http://www.hrgiger.com/frame.htm

it is very exciting and what you see there took 4.5 hours of sitting still! Which was worse than the needle thing!

that was wednesday… which was awesome! I made up for the sitting still with lots of dancing in the evening, well quite a lot, it is not actually the easiest thing to do lots of dancing with a fresh tattoo all wrapped up in clingfilm on your arm!!

So aside from that I spent the next two days curled up on a sofa with a laptop trying to get everything I needed to do done…

I did…sort of! I got everything I needed to do for my exam done and the rest I am still finishing but that didn’t harm my learning on my course this weekend 😀

My course was 2 days long in lovely Portsmouth, which is nicer than London and easier to get to!

It was at the Mountbatten Centre, which is a distinctive and oddly shaped building that I thought was older than it is…but that is not hugely relevent to the story 🙂

The first day of the course involved lots of information and practice of the sorts of tests you have to do when you first meet with a client.

things like, measuring blood pressure, and measuring people, and working out body composition. (I am going to put more of this in another post, there were calipers and everything…calipers deserve a post of their own!)

This part of me made me slightly paranoid…When I work out my body fat percentage, or my BMI or my body density it just make me realise how far I still have to go! At one point I started to question whether people really wanted an obese personal trainer…

However, there was a reassuring whole class discussion about how people actually like trainers with a story, how people these days are not always looking for the adonis type young male trainer or the blonde barbie type female ones. The fact that noone on the course met either of these stereotypes also helped 😀

After this we had an advanced anatomy and physiology exam…woohoo…way to finish off the morning! Actually it was not too bad and although we didn’t get to find out until the end of Sunday, I’ll tell you now…I passed 😀

The afternoon was all about the practical aspects of preliminary fitness assessments that we should carry out when we first meet with out clients!

we got to try them out on each other, and consequently we all had to have a go…

fitness test, that should be ok, I hear you cry…

well…

the cardio VO2 max fitness test involved jogging for a mile.

also fine, in principle…but this was indoors…in a gym and that meant only one thing!!

THE TREADMILL!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!!!

This is where my stubbornness overrode my fear and I got on the treadmill like everyone else and did my 1 mile jog test, in 11 mins 21 seconds! which is officially the longest time I have ever spent running on a treadmill in my whole life!!

Yes that’s right folks you heard it here first (or maybe second if you are my friend on facebook) I went on a treadmill for 11 mins 21 s!!!

after this dramatic turn of events which I literally only made it through by tapping into my will power reserves (yes literally…I was clenching my fists to stop myself pressing the Emergency Stop button!)

I basically feel like I narrowly escaped a dramatic death, or possibly episode of flailing about and landing on the floor!

we did things like press up tests and learned partner assisted stretching 🙂 this was much nicer!!

The second day was much more fun, we did a lot of resistance based tests and learned advanced resistance techniques 😀

I like advanced resistance techniques…

we learned such things as pyramid sets and negative sets and drop sets and supersets…and then basically got to try some out 😀

which was awesome as it meant that me and the woman I was partnered with (also called Rachel, but not the one you have heard of before) got to do some good fun heavy lifting!

we did pyramid bench presses and squat drop sets and some preloading for bench pressing…it was lots of fun…and now my legs ache!!

we then added to the fun by playing with more functional bits of equipment…you know…all the good stuff I learned about on my course a couple of weeks ago 😀 which meant that I got to play standing on a bosu having a med ball thrown at me…again 😀 yes…believe it or not, I actually enjoy that 😀

Generally speaking it was an awesome weekend 😀

Now I just need to find a guinea pig to practice on before my assessment 😀