Feeling great, if a little sore !!

[sfb350]

I still felt a bit iffy this morning and it was very foggy but I decided to give the "Women in Motion" beginners run a go again. Because I struggled with breathing last time, due to sinusitus, I took Airways chewing gum with me as it seems to do a good job of clearing my head. This time there were two of us, plus the coach, Laura. Deborah has been running for about nine months and can do a whole 3 miles without stopping so I was by far the least fit person there. Still, we did 2.8 miles of quite a hilly route, running for 2-4 minutes at a time with a short walk in between and I didn't have to stop for any of the hills so I was very pleased with that. The route was similar to last week and I did feel I'd coped with it a little more comfortably, although I had to keep blowing my nose - but at least I could breathe

We did some stretches in the car park at the leisure centre, then I went straight into the gym and did 3000metres on the rowing machine followed by an hour on the resistance/weights & power plate. Then I thought, "I must be mad but sod it, I'll try and do another kilometre on the treadmill." I managed 1.45km and 9 minutes running without a break so that was by far my best yet !! I finished W4R3 on Thursday and the longest I've run without stopping before today was 6minutes and 41 seconds.

I'm quite excited :-)))))

My feet are a bit sore though ;-/

To top it all, the sun is now shining and it's warm enough to be t-shirt weather so I'm going to clean and pamper my motorcycle and potter in the garden before cooking dinner. Bliss

[Greg_M Graduate]

Its been a few years (ermmmmm) since I went to a gym and used one in a hotel recently, they had one of those power plate things and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was for and no one else used it whilst I was in there for me to see.

How do they work?

[sfb350 Graduate]

I think they just make things more intense. I usually do some stretches and core strength exercises such as plank, push ups etc. I tried some balances today and the vibration certainly made that feel more intense. It seems to work - I've noticed I'm now a lot better at those exercises when I'm doing them in other classes. There's a big poster up on the wall with a selection of different exercises you can do - some for strength or balance and others for relaxation or massage. Some of them make you look rather silly but I don't care any more !!

I think this an official explanation of what it does:

"Power-Plate is a machine that gives the body's muscles a high-speed workout by using vibrations to stimulate them to contract and relax. They generally contract once or twice a second, but by standing on the Power-Plate, its vibrations cause an automatic reflex muscle contraction of 30-50 a second. "