One thing I like about my personal trainer is that he really pushes me to my limits. He regularly increases the difficulty of the workout to suit my needs and introducing new exercises that are more challenging.
Wednesday is scheduled for back, triceps and abs. After warming up on the treadmill, we went to the machines to do my back supersets. We started with cable row and then he combined it with wide pull ups to make it a superset. Afterwards we went to the free weights area to do dumbbell rows and dead lifts. After working out the back, he shifted to the triceps. He made me do extensions, dips and other tricep exercises. In between tricep exercises, he was trying to work out my abs. I did crunches with raised legs and two different sets of inclined leg raises.
I don't know if it's because I only had four hours of sleep that I ended up feeling woozy after the workout. But it was the first time after more than a year that I felt dizzy after a workout (the first was when I was new at the gym and my PT was also torturing me). I chalked up the dizzy feeling to the fact that my PT was gradually increasing the difficulty of my workout. I paid no mind so I went to the locker room, took a shower and then went to work.
It was tea time when I first felt the pain on my neck area. And by lunch time, it extended all the way to my chest. It felt like my muscles were getting pressed onto each other. By 3pm, I couldn't take it anymore and had the nurse sent to my desk. He advised putting hot compress over the affected area. It didn't work so he suggested that I go to the clinic.
The nurse advised me that he'd set up an appointment with the doctor on my behalf. It surprised me that when I got to the clinic, there was a long queue for the doctor. I waited 3 hours before the doctor saw me.
And in the end, it was a toss between something to do with my heart (cardiac arrest etc) or plain muscle fatigue.
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While discussing the situation with my officemates, I was trying to be as clear as I could in describing how I was feeling. I was doing it so that I'd know what to tell the doctor when he'd try to diagnose my condition.
But it hit me:
How do you describe something you've never felt or experienced before?
I couldn't describe the feeling well, I was pulling from different experiences to get an approximation of it.
In the end, I still don't know if I had given the doctor enough to make the right diagnosis. I had an ECG reading, but if it were only up to me, I'd have myself and MRI scan just to be certain.
We'll see if her medicines work.
4 comments:
i read your post, sounds like you could have had some degree of muscle strain, particularly with doing the dips since they recruit the pecs, even the neck muscles (SCM and platysma) if your not used to doing them. over exertion seems like the culprit here. in any case, the old adage "no pain, no gain" is just that, OLD. it's archaic actually. scream at ur PT if he thinks pain and near-blackouting exhaustion is his benchmark for work out effectiveness. also, ur nurse needs to brush up on her first aid as well. never treat anything acute with heat, it will just make things worse.
nabasa ko sa isang page ng reader's digest:
the best person that can diagnose you is yourself.
pakiramdaman mo lang :)
@jamie, i told my PT that i will rest for 3 days. i'll see him again on monday, hopefully by then i'm already okay.
i wouldn't blame my PT for the blackout thing, i didn't have breakfast, i had little sleep. I was just too keen on shedding the weight and burning the fat that I didn't think of whether it was still safe to continue working out.
@ming, ang aking diagnosis, tama na ang kabaliwan ko sa pagpapaganda. LOL.
Maybe pahinga muna ng unti bro. :)
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Disturbed much?