Great progress he made over 2 year training. And I felt this is the best while personal training.
Resting heart rate
His resting heart rate was higher than normal, so making his resting heart rate to normal range was our first goal. We focus on training without injury and continue this for 3 months. His resting heart rate was in the normal range after 3 – 4 months of training.
Learn normal resting heart rate
Type of training
First 3 – 4 months of training, we focused on endurance type of training, that’s because his stamina was not so good and he should have been able to do training for 1 hour session first.
After 3 – 4 months of training, I introduced some hypertrophy type of training which is more challenging for all of us but he enjoyed it the most, especially when progressing squatting, bench pressing with heavy weights.
First 20 – 30 minute session, we tried this type of training but our main focus was endurance training since we still wanted to focus on losing some weight. Balance of enjoyment and his goal was really important for him to do exercise routine for the long term.
How often we trained
We trained 2 – 3 times a week. As I mentioned, we did some hypertrophy training but oftentime that was only the first 20 minutes of 1 of our sessions in a week. One of the training sessions’s focus was to improve his cardiovascular since he wasn’t doing any exercise outside of the gym. However, after training for a year at the gym, he bought a bicycle and came to the gym with it whenever the weather was great. This is the kind of change I want to see in him.
Core strength and posture
I was very careful of doing planks when his resting heart rate was quite high. Yet having a big tummy pulls his spine out of normal alignment. We did quite a lot of palloff movements and a variety of palloff. He didn’t have a bad posture but flexibility wasn’t that good , especially tight hamstrings. We needed to work on his tight hamstrings at the end of the session.