Personal Trainer (part 1/3)

So what does it feel like, to have your own Personal Trainer? Does having one help you achieve your objective or ambitions?

Awhile ago I won in a finnish Radio Voice-competition, where the main prize was a 12-time personal trainer package. The PT would come from a finnish fitnessgym called SATS and the organization behind the competition was Rexona/Unilever.

I will split this whole story in three different parts, where I'm going to tell what it's all about training with a PT, how does it work, feelings about having one and how this affects your motivation towards your goals.

Let's start off with how this all began.

I took a part in Radio Voice's competition, where the main prize was a 12-time personal trainer package. Three lucky person would receive this reward. The Personal trainer would be coming from SATS-fitnessgym and Rexona/Unilever was the one who started the whole competition. As you can draw a conclusion from this blog writing, I was one of the lucky winners to receive the main prize.

Probably the most funniest thing about this whole thing was, I had totally forgotten this competition and the Radio Voice's morning team called me, around 8'o clock, waking me up from my slumber. I was rather surprised and shocked about me winning this fantastic prize. I mean, personal trainer's usually cost tons of money to have for this many times (12-times). WOW! Luckyy!

How the things started to roll on...

My PT contacted me via email, asking what was my goals, ambitions and how often I usually train and what myeating habits are like. I was a bit embarassed to admit, that I just ate whenever I felt like... We also concluded when the first PT-meeting would be at.

First Personal trainer meeting.

I was a bit nervous before the meeting. Luckily for me, my personal trainer was rather trustable looking guy, who clearly had trained more than me in terms of gym and fitness. I was confirmed that I would get results and find the joy in gym and power training!

We started off with a small-talk, proceeded to make a bodybalance check, where we saw how my body was in terms of fat percentage, water, bone mass, strenght mass and what surprised me the most: my left arm is stronger than my right arm. Which is surprising, because I'm right handed (a joke only men understand... ).

At the gym we trained different warm-ups, stretching, techniques in lifting and new ways to train at the gym. Technique seems to be very important, for example in lifting, so your back won't sign off your contract, during older age...

After the first PT-session, i had really good feelings about the whole thing. I was motivated like never before. Going to the gym was actually fun and the time flew like it had wings on it's back.

What kind of feelings these PT-times have brought to me personally?

I have visited my PT five times now (yes, I was supposed to make a blog post about this earlier... ), so new techniques and differet methods to train at the gym has been more familiar to me. Most of the new methods are fun to do, even if you get all sweaty and (can I say easy?) intresting to do. Some of the methods are just so annoying I want to roll on the floor and cry... One of these is move called Turkish Get Up. You can Youtube it, if you want and try it yourself.

My PT made me a food program (which after I saw it, I was rather shocked. Having to eat 3k calories during the day.. FEELS A LOT!). He also made me a training program for gym and cardio. These will help me improve and help me on my way towards my goal of participating Ironman triathlon (and finishing it under 17 hours). It feels quite amazing to visit gym nowdays, when before it was something I had to force me to do... Maybe because it's part of knowing what to do there now, instead of just chilling around.

I have a lot more positive thoughts and feelings about going to the gym now. Also my motivation for training was slightly missing in action and during Feb-April, I had eaten a bit too much ice cream... :D. The feeling can't be described with words, when you find your burning inner flame, to continue towards your ambitions and goals, towards that very dream which you want to make true.

This being said, I can recommend hiring your own personal trainer, to support you towards your goals. At least at the start. Be aware though, having your own personal trainer can be slightly addicting. The price/quality/efficiency is totally worth it, than just doing something at the gym, without knowing half what methods you could use (like using dumbells). I'm actually thinkin to purchase new 12-time personal trainer package, after my "trial" :D ends.

All thanks to SATS, Radio Voice and REXONA for making this happen. I am very pleased to have this opportunity. Thank you!

Walpurgis night (Vappu) adventure 2014

Walpurgis night, or more commonly said "Vappu", this glorious day for everyone. Vappu gathers all kind of people to celebrate and no alcohol is wasted. My personal vappu went me being sober (for once!) but little blogger inside me, wanted to commemorate this moment for everyone to see.

After I got out of work, I decided to go home and get changed to some slightly more "nicer" clothing. Once I was done with that, I left to meet up a friend and see what this years celebration would look like. The weather wasn't the best, but it's never stopped people getting drunk anyway!

Unlike normally, I was early to arrive to the meeting point. My friend had me informed, that would be late, so I had some free sparetime to chill around the centre of city. I'm usually the one being late, so I guess I had to taste how it tastes to wait on someone...

There is a tradition "jesus speaks" sermon to be held at Rautatientori, so I went and listened to it for awhile. The familiar Finland for Jesus bus was standing firmly at it's old place and the people lecturing us about how He loves us..

Bus for salvation?

In tradition, Vappu is also a day for drinking, for us finns. But to be honest, since when we needed a certain dates to get drunk? haha.

Common sight in Vappu, in Finland

My friend arrived and we set off, to walk around Helsinki's center. This tour, or adventure, will be later known as a jog/walk.

While walking around the sightsee places, we met lots of happy people, getting drunk as suspected. We crossed over a bridge and found this really beautiful lock, showing the love of two people. I wish I would get one of these to my gym lockerroom. Would be fantastic!

Carved, beautiful lock showing the love of two people

While we were on a walk, we also came across to multiple playgrounds and the inner child in me, got loose and I just had to go play around. I did some pull-ups too! In my clothes, it was slightly uncomfourtable, but luckily there wasn't any judges to give points on style of the completing movement.

Five more, go go! I wonder how many I did so far...

In another angle. Look at the firm grip, the gaze of an eagle and the happy smile. Forget about the points for style!

After the adult inside me kicked in, we left back to continue our vappu adventure journey, to burn off some calories. On our way, we came across to some beautiful sceneries. Finlands architecture can be quite a sight in the evening, with all the lights on. Even for tourists!

A slightly bigger picture of the whole sight

The night was on us, and we decided to start moving back towards the train station. On out way, we noticed the party was still going strong and Cinderella had lost her shoe. There were no signs of price, the pumpkin wagon, or mice. I wonder what happened?

Cinderella's lost shoe

Before we decided to be on our separate ways, we went for a quick window shopping at Kamppi's shopping center. We found quite fascinating items for sale. Here's few of them:

Cuteness overload!

 While I admit I laughed at this fascinating piece of art for a cloth, I started to wonder, does someone actually wear these kind of clothes?

Hi

This was a slightly different Vappu than I'm used to, but I had lot of fun walking around for 3 or so hours. My head thanked me the next day, while havign no hangover and I did some recovery training while sightseeing.

selfie

How was your Vappu, did you celebrate it? Or walpurgis night? For record, in Finland we celebrate Vappu at 30th of April (get drunk, since the enxt day is off work for everyone)

Armin van Buuren Intense Tour Finland, Helsinki

Ladies and gentlemen let me present you with Intense Tour: DJ Armiiiiiin van Buuuuuuuuuren!

 

So how does music concert has to do anything with sports you may ask? I'll give a hint: "jump, jump, jump" - for 5 hours. That ought to burn some calories. Add on top of that a visually spectacular, breath taking play from one of the best DJ's in the world and you have pretty much a amazing time at your hands.

I'm not going to write for long this time around. I'll let photo's speak for themself. 

How did I end up at Armin Van Buurens concert? Well, I received free tickets to the show and I'm not one to miss a good opportunity to have great time, listening to good music. While I knew Armin is a world famous DJ and I knew some of his tracks, I didn't expect him to be that good of a DJ. I honestly thought, that he would play couple of hours at max, but instead he played for nearly 5 hours straight. What makes it even better, he even brought various artists he has done work with with him.

Also the shows visual effects were just breath taking. The show lasted for 5 hours, but it felt like watching a good movie, with the stage capturing your eyes all the time and music pleasing your eyes the whole time.

At start of the show, Armin van Buuren hiding

At the Start, there was an egg/pearl/ball that kept captivating the minds of people.

Giant Armin staring at the singer lady.

Are you in state of trance?

Simply mind blowing. I kept staring at the stage of visual effects, while trying to jump/ dance (well finnish men don't dance - they shake) and listen to music. Man this Buuren guy knows what he's doing!

Armin van Buuren

Armin van Buuren

Armin van Buuren

and if people  started to get too drunk, it was clearly told whos concert they were listening to;)

Armin van Buuren

Some people were not that intrested on listening to music, but had their eyes on this mountain of treasures people kept throwing away. The creativity of people trying to snatch those goodies kept entertaining me the whole concert, while the security guards had their hands full the whole time trying to guard those, haha.

Treasure inside a cage

Are you ready to go even deeper?

How to make tired people jump even more when the clock is past midnight? Simple. Take out the Finnish flag and show to the audience you know where we are at. I will tell you no lies, nearly everyone got excited and started to jump and throw their hands in the air. He would have probably got people jumping on their heads, if he mentioned Finland had won Bronze medal on Olympics mens ice hockey earlier...

Armin van Buuren holding the Finnish flag

Whatever you do, do it with intense

The time seemed to be this trance audiences worst enemy and clock kept going without stopping to think of the people having fun. For many hours people had a great time listening to music played by world best DJ, watching the visual sight they call the stage and other various artists kept us entertained the whole play.

There were maybe some problems with holding a big mass concert like this at exhibition center, but I didn't notice anything to mention for. I had time of my life and all I can say: DJ saved my life tonight. Save the night for others Armin, you're the light between us!

Armin van Buuren, close to a surprise!

Armin van Buuren releases his secret: lots of airballoons from the sky

You can find more information about Intense Tour and Armin van Buuren from his official website:
http://www.arminvanbuuren.com/news/2013/10/armin-announces-armin-only-intense-world-tour/

Thank you Armin, was a wonderful play. I'm not sure why I hadn't purchased tickets earlier to your concert, but next time you come to Finland I will!

Armin van Buurens whole artist crew, dancers/ acrobatics/singers/ guitar/ drum players

Where you at the concert? Have you ever been at Armins concerts? Comment below or subsribe!

<3 Armin van Buuren <3

When the run gets tough, the tough gets you to gym!

 Hitting the gym like boss

 

 Break from running

Have you ever been at a gym? Well most people have at least visited gym once, or at least seen one on tv. But how many of you can say, that you can attend school with as great gym as I do. The gym even has a name apparently, called "The Helmi Center" - sounds like something from a ice hockey stadium doesn't it?

Helmi means pearl by the way, and while we use the Helmi Center, we're like pearls rolling around the floors. Pretty awesome if you ask from me. Like my good friend once said, "a rolling rock doesn't gain moss" - that's my motto aswell. Keep on rolling with sports!

One room of Helmi Center's Gym

If you're on a diet, or on a campaign to lose weight running is the way to go - but so is hitting gym also. Best results come if you can mix the two up in some 3 to 5 day training program.

I also noticed (yes I'm smart like this) that when you train at gym and do endurance races like marathons, you less likely get stiff arms or shoulders while running.

It was rather intresting on my first half marathon ever, to notice that my shoulders got stiff and I had to stretch them while running... Not fun at all.

Well one learns from mistakes and now I do pretty decently gym and cardio in a mixed balance. When before I didn't do gym at all, just practiced running all day long. Again I have to thank one of my friend for getting me hooked on lifting those weights. Breaking your own records at gym is almost as satisfying as breaking your own running records... Also, like while doing marathons, the plus is that there are quite often very atractive and beautiful women training also. The red haired ones are especially cute!

Other room with treadmills (I love treadmills on winter time!!!), rowing boat... thingy, stationary bikes etc.

Anyways do you have a gym at your school, work place, or do you get free vouchers to go use gym from your work place? Comment if you train at gyms, share this blog post if you run marathons!

Maybe year 2021 I look handsome with some muscles!

Thanks for reading!

Kaisaniemi half marathon

BOOM

I participated to my second half-marathon today, sunday 15th of September.

I was sort of excited to see how my training has been doing, ever since I did my first half-marathon (the Helsinki city run). On my first half-marathon ever, my time was 2.13.25.,  which was 4 months ago. The time seems to fly very fast, when you're having fun.

I picked up my running number and shirt day before, on saturday, so I wasn't in a hurry to go to the running site. I left my apartment around 11.50 o´clock, just to realise today was sunday and the public transportation time schedules run slower  than normally. The start of the half-marathon was at 12.45 o´clock.

So I went into slight panic, and ran all the way to the train station, just to notice the train was running late by 6 minutes and would arrive quickly. Luckyyyyy me! VR, oh how I love you so (VR=goverment railroads)

I arrived at center of station around 12.15, where I headed off to the running area. Since it was near the train-station, it didn't take more than just couple of minutes.

I quickly noticed the event is quite small, but I liked the atmosphere. Very friendly and smiling people everywhere. Some of the people were young, some old, so this race would become very intresting.

The run was designed to start at 12.45 and the runners were announced to go to the starting like 5 minutes before the start.

15 seconds before the starting, they announced some very famous runner would send us off with his start pistol. But I don't think he understood finnish, because the announcer said "paikoillenne! (means get ready!) and after that the pistol fired... everyone was quite confused but we started to run anyways.

The run was quite smooth, no bigger problems and it had really beautiful scenery. We ran past parks and stuff in the middle of the city. Very relaxing and great atmosphere.

I noticed there wasn't any toilets though... Would have been unlucky to get the urges to go pee or poop while running!

But like always, everything fun comes to an end and the 21+ km run started to getting closer to the finishing line. I was going to pick up my pace around 1km before the finishing line, but decided I'll just go with the flow and enjoy scenerys.

Last few hundred meters, I could see the finishing line getting closer and closer and BOOM! My second half-marathon was completed!

TIME WAS 1.57.50 !!! That means I ran my second half-marathon 15 minutes faster than my first! WOW. This if what is when you can see results of your hard work (though i'm quite lazy - infact if I were a Pokemon, I would probably be a Snorlax...)

I was quite happy with the outcome and clearly my motivation and the bar to train even further and get better times just got raised up quite a bit!

The whole day was fun! I definetly go to Kaisaniemi run next year also!
(you can find more information about Kaisaniemi juoksu here:)



And since pictures tell more than a thousand words here are some:

                                       It's me, it's me !!! LOOK I'm on TV... Err, on picture!!

                                        10 km to go, or was I trying to wave at someone?

 

                                                                     Eye of the tiger...

                                                                          Last spurt!

                                         AND HE FINISHES THE RACE TIME 1.57.50!

                                                                    Victory pose! 

                                           Attempting to eat the medal... I was hungry!

                                                         YEAAAH, sports are fun!
                                          15 minutes better time than last half marathon!!!




                                                     

                               Wait, if I'm a clown, does that mean I'm a clown marathonist?!



                                                            Thanks for reading!

                                                                       Subsribe!

First post!

 Introduction

Doesn't everything great start with a introduction? In this case, that probably won't be true, but a "first post" is always a great way to start your own blog.

Little bit about me: I'm a 28-year old male, living in Helsinki, Finland. My english is horrible, but maintaining this blog, I hopefuly improve it a little bit. Let's see how often I need to use Google translator. I've never been in to sports, apart from occasional game sessions with friends back in my childhood, which was ages ago. I've also been "slightly" overweight (maybe I'll add a before and after photos at some point), which probably is the reason why I'm now so intrested in doing training - you fit in to all these cute clothes, you can be as much random as you want and nobody cares and the best part is sports are fun!

If you read the blog channel description "achieving your goals", you pretty much know what this blog contains. It's about achieving your goals, getting better and being able to push to your limits. Yes it can mean sports, but can also mean something else, like eating your vegteables.

In my case, this is, indeed a sports training blog. The purpose is to keep me motivated to train, keep pushing forward, improving and ultimately enter a ironman competition.

If by any chance someone ends up reading this and is motivated to start healthy lifestyle with sports, then it has done even more than I hoped for!

I'm a complete beginner when it comes to sports, eating healthy and stuff. I've only entered few endurance tests this year (a half- and full marathon), which I somehow managed to complete with decent times.

I've looked into possible ironman triathlon completitions and the most reasonable place to compete in it, is in Sweden. I would also have a year to train for it also. A year for a beginner to enter a ironman triathlon? Sounds like a dream doesn't it? - But like Nike says: Just do it. - I'm going to follow that example and train for it, see where it leads and if I think I have a shot at completing the ironman challenge under 17 hours, I will enter the competition.

What is Ironman?

Oh what is a Ironman triathlon? It's probably one of the hardest endurance tests there are, pushing your body to the limits and those who have finished it under 17 hours have the bragging rights for life.

Hey you want to be ironman too, what you need to do? In the competition you have to:
1) swim 3.86 kilometers/ 2.4-miles (this is going to be really, really hard)
2) bicycle ride 180.25 kilometer/ 112-miles (I need to buy a proper bike for this)
3) run a full marathon (42.2 kilometers/ 26.2-miles)
You have 17 hours to do them all...

I've read you need to train around 15 hours a week... sounds easy!

You can find more information at www.ironman.com

In any case, this is the first post of hopefuly many to come and I will keep posting about stuff I do, like training, eating, marathons I enter and so forth.

 Oh and what did I do today? I was at the gym:

- Cross trainer for 30 minutes (15 minutes at level 10, 10 minutes in level 12 and 5 minutes at level 15) for warm-up,
- Did some back and chest training, abs training,
- Finished it with running for 15 minutes at high pace.

 No pictures, but there will be in the future.

 Thanks for reading!

Ps. If you are on my google+ circle and do not wish to receive this mumbojumbo blog posts, remove the contact. Thank you!