Day 1 – Gym time!
So Sunday 30th September was the first gym day. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, although I was keen to jump in and get started. I spent the evening before downloading multiple apps to my phone and Apple Watch. I’ll post more on these later as I want to cover off what works well, what integrates and what I’m going to settle on using. I say going to as the jury is still out.
Once I had the apps I grabbed a few “beginner” routines and picked some exercises I thought I would be comfortable with. Nothing complicated and nothing too major. I set what I thought was reasonable weights and lengths of time depending on the type of activity. My “plan” is below…
| Exercise | Weight / resistance | Sets | Reps | Notes |
| Rowing Machine | Resistance 9 | 5 KM | ||
| Bench Press | 30 KG (2 x 10 KG + Bar) | 3 | 10 | |
| Seated Leg Extension | 60 KG | 3 | 10 | |
| Stationary Bike | Resistance 9 | 10 Mins |
That was it. Nice and simple, concentrate a little on cardio but do some weights as its a gym and thats the thing to do. Looks really simple right? Man, did I struggle with this though. What I actually managed is this…
| Exercise | Weight / resistance | Sets | Reps | Notes |
| Rowing Machine | Resistance 9 | 1 KM | ||
| Bench Press | 30 KG (2 x 10 KG + Bar) | 3 | 10, 5, 3 | |
| Seated Leg Extension | 60 KG | 3 | 10 | |
| Stationary Bike | Resistance 9 | 3 Mins |
I felt pathetic heading to the shower after that, I also felt light headed and sick. I had barely broken a sweat but just felt so wasted that I couldn’t complete half of what meagre start I had planned. I headed home more than a little deflated, and not in the way I would like to have been deflated. That actually would have met the objective quite nicely.
Once home I headed straight to my laptop to figure out why I was so terrible. Point 1, spending too much time previously with my laptop was a major contributor! The other major factors were food and water. My forced fasting meant that I wasn’t taking on anywhere near the calories needed on a daily basis and so my body was spending quite a lot of time and effort dealing with this sudden loss. To suddenly throw an increase in exercise at it too meant it didn’t have the fuel to cope. It tired quickly. As for water, I learned this was even more critical and probably contributed to me “not breaking a sweat”. I simply didn’t have the moisture to spare. This led to the dizzy head and nausea. So lesson learned. I needed to make sure I ate the right things (difficult given the gallstone thing) and drink lots of fluid before my second attempt.
The rest of the day was really spent moping about and trying to build a slightly different plan for the following day.
