As some of you know, I started to workout with a trainer after Baylie was born. The baby pounds were simply refusing to budge despite my best efforts, so I bought a package of weekly workouts with a trainer named Jen. She has now been abusing me weekly for about 8 months. And oddly enough, I LIKE IT.

I would love to tell you that she’s mean and awful and that she screams and yells at me during workouts – it would make for a better story. unfortunately, it’s much much worse…she’s increadibly NICE. Ridiculously nice. And funny and I want to be her friend and I don’t want her to think that I’m a slacker so I work really hard at our sessions. Instead of saying that I’m slacking off, she’ll say “come on girl, you can do this! You’re working so hard today!”. And I, being the praise lover that I am, work harder.  I generally cannot walk after the amount of lunges and squats that we do – and my triceps literally cry at the meer mention of her name, but I continue on because I want to hear “good job!”.

When I first started working out with Jen, I decided to try her weekly boot camp on top of our regular sessions. I brought my friend Kristin with me to an eight am class in September. Now, it’s still hot in September and I was still in pretty crappy shape with many lb’s to go. So as I’m squat jumping as fast as I can without passing out, Kristin breathless says in between jumps “I want my legs to look like hers so we have to keep moving!!”. This was good inspiration to make it through the workout, however, I decided after that one abuse a week is enough. And did Jen yell? No! We ended up getting together for lunch instead.

Which leads me to another story – Jen and her husband came over for dinner a few months ago. I was very excited, until I realized that I have to serve my trainer dinner and she’s going to be thinking “no wonder those pounds won’t come off!!”. I chickened out of serving pork chops and we had a big salad with chicken instead. I’m sure she and her hubby went home and chowed down on some celery or something, but at least she doesn’t think I eat terribly…or at least that I’m smart enough to hide it when she’s over!

The only really mean thing that Jen does is she gives really awful, cruel and impossible  exercises very cute names. Burpies, ice skaters, hip dips and skull crushers (ok, that one isn’t cute, but it’s a pretty rad name) are all good examples of really hateful things that we do as part of or in between circuits. For example, a burpie: some call it an “up down” but you go from a standing position to a squat, jump back to plank position, jump back to a squat and then standing. Sounds simple enough – but after 3 sets of 20 lunges with 20 pounds of weight, 20 burpies becomes a bit of a challenge.

So now that Baylie is almost 10 months old, I can safely say that I have lost the baby weight, a few “vanity pounds” too and have muscle tone where I didn’t know I had muscles. All thanks to my buddy who I like more and more with each hurting week 🙂