Returning to the gym after a decade away: Hitting the gym with Jack

In partnership with Protein World

Hitting the gym with Jack

If you have been following my mission to return to the gym after more than a decade away, then you will know that it has not been a particular easy one. Part of the difficulty with going back to working out regularly after years of not doing so is that you essentially forget how to do it. You forget how to get up off the couch, you forget what a gym even looks like and you certainly forget how to lift a weight of any kind. My initial experience with doing this was tough, but over a relatively short space of time I found myself not only enjoying the workouts but also the healthy eating laid out of by Protein World's nutritional plan. I have even found myself opting for Protein World's snack options, such as their Protein Clusters or The Slender Blend chocolate chip bars rather than those sitting temptingly in my cupboard or fridge. It has been a refreshing change. I am feeling better, lighter and stronger and was, very briefly, beginning to think that this would be easy. Then I met Jack Fincham and his personal trainer Dean Vallis, who welcomed me down to a gym in Wapping for a 7am Monday morning workout. The dark and freezing cold early morning air around me as I sat in a car driving to the location at 6.15 should have given me an indication of what to expect when I entered the gym, but I was still confident that the "intense" workout I'd been told about would not be too much for me to handle. I was very wrong. Over the course of just under an hour Jack and Dean put me through some serious paces. First we had the SkiErg machine, which sounds like what it is. You lift your hands up, grab the handles and pull down as if your skiing vertically. This was followed by running on a treadmill. It was all very hard. "This is very hard," I thought. https://player.vimeo.com/video/307737559 Then the warm up ended and we got to the real deal. 15 second rest periods, followed by a whole host of exercises, from burpees - which truly are the devil's exercise - to dumbbell lifts, to more treadmill running and some TRX rows. Jack's PT, Dean, was extremely helpful along the way, offering encouragement throughout, while Jack and I occasionally exchanged looks of "yes, this is hard, isn't it?" while passing each other on the way to another drill. In the brief rest periods we had some quick chats about his ambition to get into the boxing ring, having boxed for years in his youth, and about my ambition to make it through the workout in one piece. It was extremely difficult and I was very, very tired, helped only by the knowledge that Jack, too, was tired, but not as tired as me. No one as tired as me at that time. Eventually, it ended, and I went home, standing in my shorts on the Tube as the commuters went the opposite direction. For the first time ever, I felt like someone who actually works out. Find Jack's #SixPackJack journey with Protein World here.