Fun Day at the Gym with Nike Training Club

Oh yes, that's exactly what happened yesterday. I had fun at the gym. I figured I might as well make the most of it and as I haven't found a local running club yet (no one else to blame but myself!), I headed over for some dreadmill intervals, followed by 30 minutes of Nike Training Club and 15 minutes of flexibility yoga thanks to my Yoga Studio app. Who needs a personal trainer if you got apps?

So my dreadmill sesh looked like this: warm up (2 laps), 2 x 800m, 2 x 400m, 2 x 200m, cool down. I think I did alright. I did the 800s at a bit faster than race pace, then cranked it up for the 400s and hit the 200s at sub-7m/m, which is mighty fast for this one (at one point I had a vision of myself flying backwards off the treadmill and had to slow down to control my internal giggle...). 

Then I headed over to the mats and did a Nike Training Club sesh. It's an app that (as all cool things) was recommended to me by my baby sister Becci. There are tons of workouts, divided into different goals, like getting lean, toned, strong, and short, 15-minute focused workouts aimed at different parts of your body. 

It's actually pretty cool (I'm one of those people who hate to go with what's cool only to come around, a gazillion years after everyone else, to discover to my amazement what I've been missing out on. Honest, I didn't want to make the switch from cassette tapes to CDs and only did because I could no longer find any of the albums I wanted on tape. I was also the last person ever to get an iphone or to start running, for that matter!).

Anyhoo, I've only tried the beginners' Get Strong workouts so far (race training and all) and I gots to tell ya: I'm not sure what they're basing their 'beginners' status on. I had my bootey whopped by every single one of those and I used to consider myself semi-fit!

Basically, in a nutshell, it's circuit training and you got a 'virtual trainer' telling you every minute or so what to do next. So it's easy enough to do this at the gym over your headphones if you don't mind looking like a bit of an idiot sliding and gliding through the gym and rushing to do a new exercise every 60 seconds. Good thing I don't.

The 'Total Adrenaline' is what I did today and weeeee... it hurt so good. You use weights for some of the exercises and when you click on each exercise it explains you with pictures how to do it properly and there's even a quick video where a very tall, skinny, beautiful and oiled up chica demonstrates how to do it properly (funnily enough I thought this was aimed mostly at women?!). 

Apparently there are 'rewards' for every however-many minutes of training you do and you unlock badges and get acces to new, famous-athlete-designed workouts. All that stuff is a lot less important to me. But I do like that there are a gazillion different workouts on there and that someone talks you through them. Basically, it's just what this unimaginative gal here needs to get out of doing the exact same routine every time I hit the gym. So go on, give it a try. It's free!* 

*No one has paid me to endorse this, but if someone at Nike would like to send me some free kit as a thank you, I'd be very grateful indeed.

Have you tried the NTC app? 

Do you use any other apps to work out or are you old school?