This is a guest post by Kate Bown

Monday morning arrives and I awake with a smile. Yep Monday and smiling. And this is normal for my Monday! Why? Because I realise it’s a CHG day. A Cardio Haters Gym day that is.

I’m one of the 6:30pm groupies and I have been training for about 4 months now.

I’m going to run you through a typical session from when I walk in till I leave at the gym.

We (about 13 of us) normally roll up about 6:20pm to get in some foam rolling, stretching and chatting in before we start our group warm up. This time is good to catch up with what others have been doing outside the gym, be it exercise related or not, since our last session.

When it’s time Grant will get us started on the dynamic warm up and have us perform some interestingly named stretches, some of which always cause a smile within the group.  Every muscle /muscle group is covered for what exercises we will be doing that night.

Once we are sufficiently warmed up we move on to our first exercise.

Tonight this was the barbell shoulder press. Everyone has their own weight that they are up to based on their one rep max – me – I’m still just using the bar. 

Most do five sets of five (with two lower weighted and numbered warm up sets), but this is my kryptonite and I’m just managing to push out five sets of three. But this excites me, finally did this without struggling.

Grant uses a basic progressive overload method by adding 2.5 kilos to the bar each week. Once we max out – can no longer get 5 sets of 5 with that weight – we deload and repeat the process again.

 Because I’m just using the bar and haven’t got much room to play with, my progressive overload method is a little different to others. Grant manipulates my sets and reps so that I continue to progress. Next week I’ll be up to 6 sets of 3! And then 8 sets of 2!

After this exercise we then moved onto a superset – where you go back and forth between 2 exercises – of neautral grip inverted rows and barbell glute bridges. Yippee I can do these. Both four sets of eight.

The barbell glute bridge was a new exercise so Grant gave a demonstration and explanation first up and then it was our turn. It took a bit for everyone to get the hang of it, and this provided a few laughs with the ‘ohhhhs’ and ‘ahhhs’ and ‘this doesn’t quite feel natural’ comments going around.

Once done with that we move on to the finisher. As you probably know, the finisher acts as our cardio instead of a typical jog on the treadmil.

 There is lots of encouragement and comraderie as each group goes through their set (over and over again) and you can see the pain on people’s faces.  

This nights finisher included medicine ball pushups, medicine ball slams and medicine ball squat jumps.

I’ve decided it’s called a finisher for more than one reason and my favourite is that if you thought you still had some energy left, or that you coped pretty well this particular night…well you won’t after the finisher.

It will finish you right off, so much so that you won’t even remember that feeling you had before and you so badly want the finisher to finish because it is in the processing of killing you…well ok not literally…and you know that when it finally does, finish not kill you that is – you will be completely spent, used up, spat out and FINISHED.

It is the best feeling!

The high is so great all I can think of (after lying on the floor catching my breath and sanity for a bit) is bring on the next session!

And that’s pretty much how we do it at Cardio Haters.

If you liked this post please let me know by commenting or clicking the ‘like’ button below.

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Related posts:

1. Low Battery, Seinfeld and 3 Cardio Haters Tips
2. Cardio Haters Makes You A Better Runner?
3. Tour Of My New Cardio Haters Gym
4. Old School Finisher That Gets You Ripped Without Cardio
5. How To Lose The First 19 Kilos With Cardio

Posted in Training by Grant 2 Comments