A thing I like about my gym is that they provide free exercise mentoring. Whenever you like, you can book half an hour with someone who knows a lot about working out correctly and they help you set up a personal exercise schedule that covers your particular needs. I did this in October last year, and I’ve been using the hints and tips I got ever since.

I also got a sheet where I could write down various stats to track my progress and the dates I was at the gym. A couple of weeks ago the sheet was full and I asked if they had a blank one I could use to replace the old one. Unfortunately, they were no longer using the sheets, everything had been moved to an electronic platform on the interweb.

Cool! The only problem was that they’d made the transition to the electronic sheets a month after I had my half an hour of mentoring, meaning that my data was not registered in their system. I had to book another half an hour with a my mentor to register my data.

So yesterday I met with my man Roger. My intention was to just register my current schedule, maybe add another exercise and leave it at that. But that was not gonna happen on Roger’s watch!

Now I’ve suddenly got two different schedules, one for chest and back muscles and one for shoulders and arms. Both should take about an hour, that’s up fifteen minutes from my current program. They also involve complicated stuff like dumbbells and - shock and horror - Bench Press. My recurring gym nightmare. I’m not even sure I’m able to lift the bar properly.

To be honest, I’m a rather skeptical about all this, because it means taking my workouts to a level I really didn’t imagine I would - mostly because becoming this serious about everything wasn’t part of my original plan. And to me, bench press and dumbbells are a bit over the top. We’ll see how well this works out (pun very much intended), maybe it falls through completely or maybe I welcome the change. It might be a good thing to have two programs, instead of just repeating the same one every time.