A Challenging Challenge

While I work out with my trainer 4 times a week for an hour, I wear a heart rate monitor.  The brand is called "MyZone" and the information shows up on a TV monitor that the trainer can see while you're working out.  He can know when you've reach 100 percent of your max heart rate, and then how long to allow for heart rate recovery to back to normal, etc.  Besides monitoring heart rate, the belt measures calories burned and something called MEP's. 

MEPs is an acronym for MyZone Effort Points, and it's how effort is measured in the MyZone system. MEPs are earned by exercising within in your desired heart rate zone over a period of time. The more effort you put into your workouts, the more MEPs you earn. 

The workout is designed along the lines of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training.)   The point is to stay within the yellow (aerobic activity) as much as possible, with periodic spurts into the red zone (which is anaerobic).  On upper body days, the workout usually consists of upper body weight lifting such as shoulder presses or push ups (green), interspersed with some full body work such as TRX rows (yellow) and finally mountain climbers or medicine ball slams for 45 seconds (red). Lower body days consist of weighted squats, lunges, etc, interspersed with fast cardio activities.  Each workout, we try to do the circuit 3 times. 

So my gym started a two week challenge yesterday which involves the average MEP's per workout.  I've been working out for over 3 years with my trainer, and I always push myself really hard.  Of course, now that it's a competition, I push myself even harder.

So this was my workout yesterday.  It was upper body and over the course of an hour workout, I burned 555 calories and produced 216 MEP's.   

Yesterday, I thought that was a good number.  But today was lower body day and I burned a lot more...eek!  Okay, I am really tired now.  (At several points, around the 2/3 mark, I thought I was gonna puke...but I didn't. I just kept going.) 

I am glad the challenge is only two weeks!  Apparently my trainer has been telling the other trainers about me as the one to beat...yeah, here I am, a 65 year old lady and I'm supposedly gonna beat people who are much younger and probably in better shape.

We'll see.  I'm pretty competitive so I hope I can keep up this pace for the duration.  Wish me luck!