AS I sit and write this, now four days after my first training session of the week, my legs still feel like they belong to a 93-year-old.
They are slowly improving – at one stage I was looking into the price of a mobility scooter to get around.
Stephen wasn’t joking when he said the real work was starting this week.
Session one was lower body again. Starting with weights on the frame and some squats, we soon moved onto split squats, this time with handweights to make things just that bit more difficult.
Three lots of 12 reps, alternated with three lots of 15 reps on the glute-ham machine.
So far so good, it was hard, but not too hard, with plenty of time for chatter between exercises about various topics, including Stephen and his wife’s bodybuilding.
A fascinating subject and something I know nothing about. All natural, and involving huge amounts of dedication to get to the top.
This all lulled me into a false sense of security.
Next we headed over to the astro-turf strip. What did me in was three lots of walking lunges up and down.
I’m sure it must be uphill on the way back. This really burned, and I could tell from the way my legs were behaving (ie not entirely under my control) that this was going to hurt in the next few days.
After a breather, we did three times up and down dragging the sled with 100kg on. I’d learnt from my first time out with this piece of kit to pace myself, so I managed my three goes without almost making myself sick.
Stephen’s recovery advice was a hot bath with Epsom salts, to foam roller my legs, drink plenty of water and get on the bikes over the next couple of days to get the blood flowing.
Well, driving home was fun. My legs were so heavy that every time I braked I nearly ended up with whiplash.
And over the next two days, I got stiffer, and stiffer until the top half of my legs were essentially lumps of concrete. I hadn’t been in this much trouble since I ran (crawled) a marathon.
I tried swimming, but that didn’t help. The hardest thing was getting up and down from chairs. And getting out of or into the car. Or going down steps.
Three days in, and things finally started to improve. Back in at Paragon for my second session of the week I was at least walking like a relative of the human species.
It was an upper body day, and Paragon manager Ian Wilson was taking my session. We started with some weights (don’t laugh – a total of 5kg plus the bar), but the random music playlist kept making me giggle.
We go from (unidentifiable) gangster rap, to Green Day, to Van Halen (Jump!) to Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.
It’s not easy to concentrate, even lifting my pixie-sized weights, when you’re chuckling at 80s hair rock.
Anyway, we moved on to seated hand-pulls, alternated with standing while lifting one 5kg hand weight above my head until my arm is straight.
My wobbly arms were struggling a bit, so I asked Ian if anyone has ever dropped one of these weights on their head. No, he said. Reassuring.
After this we went between lifting two 5kg hand weights above my head while seated, and using the rowing-type machine with a rope handle, pulling my hands back to my ears and keeping high elbows and shoulders down to work various muscles.
We finished off with three lots of farmers walks. And now I do feel like I’m in the heats for World’s (weakest) Strongest Woman. But at least it's a walk, which is progress by the standards of the last couple of days.
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