Trainer Notes: Week Four

It's the end of our first month, and all I can say is, Wow!! It still amazes me what can be accomplished with great commitment, effort, attitude, the right plan, and the right people to support, motivate, and coach you through it. What a difference this first 4 weeks has made for Michael. He is changing and progressing at such a quick rate, I'm not sure people who haven't seen him in a while will even recognize him a few months from now. He is working so hard and has followed through on every single recommendation we've made. In this first month, he has improved his strength and conditioning level tremendously, and has already lost close to 15 lbs. and 4 inches around his waist! We'll do our next "official" weigh in next week, as well as the measurements again for more details on that. Overall, it's amazing how much stronger his legs and core muscles have gotten, and he has actually doubled, that's right - doubled, his upper body strength already from where he started.

So, next week we will start his new workout routine. New programs are all about progression for us. We want to create that variable change in an effective, but safe way to help Michael reach his ultimate goal. Everything we do, every exercise we select for Michael, has a purpose, and is designed to take him to the next step. It's not enough to just throw a bunch of challenging exercises together and make him sweat and burn calories. It takes educated planning and solid rationale to obtain "predictable" results. The better and more safely we "progress" him, the more we can do moving forward. This will mean that exercises can be more advanced and challenging in the future without risk of injury, and the higher the intensity of sets and the overall workout can be. In the next few months Michael will surprise himself by doing things and accomplishing things he may have never thought possible. Now that he's gotten past the initial adaptation and has already starting progressing, we will be going into month 2 with more challenging progressions and exercises. We are also going to decrease his rep range from 15 to 12 so he can handle some of the new exercises better and so we can increase some resistance levels where appropriate to continue to increase strength and build lean muscle. We will be combining the exercises differently as well to challenge his conditiong level more. We're excited to start this next step with Michael, and stay tuned for the updates on his measurements.