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2006-01-16, The Edmonton Journal

New Year, New Life for Contest Winner

Chris Zdeb; journal staff writer, Edmonton

Bobbi Robbins embarks on a custom-designed fitness adventure

It was something of a surprise. Bobbi Robbins underwent a physical assessment last Thursday, prior to starting the 12 weeks of personal training she won in our New Year, New You contest, and found she was in worse shape than she thought.

“I’m lower in my cardio, my flexibility, everything.” Completing the test components of the assessment “was hard, to be honest,” she sad. “It shows how far I’ve let myself go. It’s a good eye-opener.”

But while slightly bent by the reality of her starting fitness level, the outgoing Robbins, a 37-year-old mom and teacher’s assistant at Ross Sheppard high school, is far from broken. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I’m still very excited to keep going and to see more improvements,” she said after the assessment.

She then headed home for a hot bath and a glass of wine.

Although Robbins was hard on herself, Alexandra Senkow, fitness director at Defining Eve personal fitness studio, who will be Robbins’s personal fitness trainer for the next 12 weeks, said her new client did quite well for someone who stopped working out regularly seven years ago.

“Her upper body strength is really good. She couldn’t do triceps pushups, but her performance at wide pushups was pretty good. Being able to do 12 is a great start – a lot of people can’t do eight!” Senkow enthused.

A physical assessment gives client and trainer a better understanding of where the client is as they start to work together. It identifies a client’s strengths and weaknesses which the trainer then uses to custom design a program to improve fitness, Senkow says. For example, testing Robbins’s heart rate on a treadmill while Senkow gradually increased the speed and incline of the ramp provided a better idea of what Robbins is capable of. It also gave Robbins a chance to rate her level of exertion at various points during the 10-and-a-half-minute test, to better understand what it feels like to work at different levels of intensity – one being the equivalent of sitting on a couch and 10, carrying a couch.

The sit-and-reach test, which required Robbins to sit on the floor with legs out in front, take a deep breath and reach forward, with her hands as far as she could, showed she was a tight back and needs to work on flexibility, Senkow says. The assessment was confirmed during a partner-assisted stretch at the end of the almost hour-long assessment, when she found Robbins actually has a lot of flexibility in her hamstrings.

“It’s common for women to have weak abdominals and a very tight lower back because they stabilize every movement with their lower back. When they lift or carry something they actually arch the lower back to protect it,” Senkow says.

In Robbins’s case, her abdominals are quite strong – she was able to hold a plank position (holding herself up on the balls of her feet and her elbows, pulling her belly button to her spine) during a core test for 21 seconds, Senkow says. 

But more important than providing an inventory of her physical strengths and weaknesses, the physical assessment revealed Robbins has a winning attitude.

High scores for great attitude

 “She jogged during the cardio test when she could have kept walking on the treadmill (even though Robbins had said she isn’t comfortable jogging or running),  and  she did really well for a minute and a half,” Senkow says.

“During the entire process she didn’t say ‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ she said, ‘OK, I’m going to try,’ and that’s a really important attitude because you don’t know if you can do something until you try, so attitude is everything,” Senkow explains.

Robbins also keeps on seeing results, which increases the likelihood of achieving her goals.

After Robbins got a doctor’s okay to start working out, the two women sat down for a 30-minute consultation last Monday to talk about her goals. Robbins is looking to make fitness a part of her lifestyle. She also hopes to lose 20 pounds over 12 weeks, which Senkow says is probably not realistic.

“You should be looking to lose about a pound a week. Making new habits and a lifestyle change will help you reach your goal (of losing 20 pounds) beyond the 12 weeks of training,” Senkow told her.     

But Robbins stubbornly replied that she would be quite disappointed if 12 pounds was all that she lost in the next three months.

“Knowing my body, losing two to three pounds a week is quite realistic,” she told the trainer.

Senkow pointed out that a lot of the initial weight people lose is actually water retention loss from eating healthier and the body functioning better. She also explained that by losing body fat and building muscle simultaneously by lifting weights, Robbins may not lose anything on the weight scale, but her body will be transformed, and she will lose dress sizes at a faster rate than somebody who is losing body fat, but not building muscle.

“Losing six to eight pounds, when you’re adding muscle tone at the same time, can mean going down a size, where for people who don’t add muscle mass it takes 12 to 15 pounds,” Senkow told her.

“I don’t care if I weigh 150 pounds as long as I can get into a size 9,” Robbins, who used to be that size, but is currently a size 16/18.

Client and trainer decided Robbins will work out three times a week for an hour after work. Mondays will be a cardio workout, Tuesdays and Thursdays she’ll work with weights. Her workouts will be changed from session to session, becoming more challenging on a gradual basis, Senkow says. There will also be homework – exercises Robbins agreed to do on her own. Senkow also wants her to add some kind of physical activity, a walk, for example, on the weekend.

Robbins says she plans to walk for at least 20 minutes each day with her fiancé Todd.

She’ hasn’t even started her workouts and already the world is watching what she’s doing, what she’s eating, she says laughing.

She can’t buy french fries at the school cafeteria any more because the cafeteria lady won’t see them to her. And at Thursday’s staff meeting she chose fruit over doughnuts “because everyone was watching me,” she says.

Check in next week on Bobby Robbins’s first week of personal training on her way to achieving a lifestyle change.

STATS

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