 |
Tastes Like Chicken, April 2005
Body + Soul, June 2005
About.com, November 2005
ExerciseRadio, February 2006
Nukitchen, April 2006
People magazine, April 2006
DIVA gets 2nd Printing, May 2006
ExerciseRadio Podcasts, Sept 2006
Terri in Pocketchangenyc Mar 2007 |
MY ONLINE TRAINER
from body + soul, June 2005
I really do want to get in shape. But having never maintained a workout program for more than a day, I thought I'd try a new approach: Web-based online personal training. I signed up for a month with fitness trainer Terri Walsh's online personal training program, hoping she could help. Walsh runs her own gym in New York City and has the celebrity clients required for any trainer to be taken seriously. Her $75-a-month program (online-personaltraining-nyc.com) includes custom weekly workouts, unlimited e-mail exchanges, and two half-hour phone consultations.
The centerpiece of TWTNYC's Online Personal Training is the plan that Walsh sends to you weekly - like your own personal Mission: Impossible assignment. She started me on what she called "the basics," or what I called "the limits of human endurance." I was to walk a half mile in less than eight minutes, do 90 abdominal crunches (in sets of 10, interspersed with rest periods), do eight minutes of shadowboxing, and build up leg muscles with a regimen of squatting, stair-stepping, and lunging.
I couldn't have been more intimidated if I'd been asked to sweep up the Sahara. But to my astonishment, I managed to get through the routine without tearing, straining, or breaking anything. I proudly filled in the exercise log to send to Walsh, although I had to admit that I hadn't been able to complete the half mile in less than nine minutes. Within a half hour she shot back an e-mail with a helpful tip: "Walk faster."
That was my first day's lesson in the power of accountability, also known as not wanting to look like a wimp in front of my trainer. It propelled me through a whole series of next days even as the workouts gradually got more challenging. When I inadvertently forgot to send her the log for my abdominal exercise, she was right there with an e-mail asking me about it. And when I finally cracked the eight-minute walk, she sent me a message that read, "WOOO-HOOO!" I'm embarrassed about the glow I felt when I saw that.
I'm now three weeks into the program, and I can see that working with a personal trainer, even a cyber one, definitely pays off. I wonder whether the benefits will provide enough motivation for me to continue long-term. I'm betting 100 crunches on it. - B.G.
|
|
