What, me pull up?

A good week last week - not quite as good as the one before but I'm still progressing in the right direction.

I'm once again training three days in a row this week so I can leave to visit my sweet nephew this weekend.  Recently we did what I call "mock pull ups" in the gym.  So instead of looking like this

In thin air, no less.

I climbed aboard a big machine, like so:

Trainer Tom was on the opposite side, which is where there is another platform, which looked to have a lot of weights on it.  Tom stood on his end, and I stood on mine.  I initiated the pull up, and Tom helped by levering me up when I could pull no further.  I then controlled the movement downward, again with assistance.  Four sets of ten with 25 squats between sets, and I thought I was going to die, even though I wasn't even close to doing it all on my own.

We've done a lot of routines to prepare me for this, such as something like this:

which, when you get to the third or fourth set of 25 is pretty darned hard all by itself.

Tom says I'll be doing pull ups on my own before I know it.  I believe him.  Also:  BIG incentive to lose weight.

I also accomplished a two-minute plank yesterday.  I'll bet I looked just like this girl

if she was dripping with sweat, red, trembling and whimpering.

We do a ton of planks, including ball planks

but again, with more sweating, redness, trembling, whimpering, and on the ball you can add sinking-into-my-forearms.

We have started doing roll outs

I couldn't find an image of a woman doing this.  Hm.

which Ted does at home.  I truly do not care for these.

Yesterday was pretty tough, I think because I did 40 minutes on the treadmill BEFORE training.  I won't be doing that again today.  Or any day any time soon.

So I'm off to the gym, because I want to be doing this all by myself: