A personal trainer can be highly motivating, writes Gill South. But this trainee might just be a little too high maintenance.
Whenever I see people working out in public with their personal trainers, I think, "You poor sod, paying someone to put you through all that".
But I have to say personal trainers do have their uses for the recalcitrant among us who need a giant boot up the derriere to make any progress.
Now, while Karina Balle, personal trainer and the physio who runs Fit Studio in Grey Lynn, would quite happily have taken me through various exercise machines in her gym - she's got all kinds of fancy equipment - I tell her there's no use me doing this because I'm just not a gym girl. What I'm looking for is a more rigorous way of doing my walks so I still have plenty of daydreaming time, but I am actually working up a bit of a sweat. Karina is happy with this as long as I'm throwing some specific body-weighted exercises into my outdoor routine so I'm developing active muscle tissue. Resistance training is about making sure there is activational pull on the bone, she tells me. Yuck.
Karina is a bit of a techie. She has attached a heart monitor to me and another thing around my arm, a BodyMedia Fit armband-which we are using as a pedometer and calorie counter in this case. Ideally when someone like me is exercising, my heart rate should be between 118 and 157 beats per minute (bpm) for most of the time. When I'm walking on the flat it is a mere 100-104 which is pretty typical of my daily walk. This is not good enough, according to Karina. I accost various pieces of park furniture, at her request, doing press-ups here and step-ups there. In between we walk along briskly.
