After a year of working out in Simpsonville at the Life Center and ASI, I’ve moved up to the ASI facility on Patewood.  That means I wake up a little earlier in the morning on Tuesday and Thursday (5am opposed to 5:30am) and I drive up to Patewood road which adds about 15 minutes more to my workout commute.  Yet, I know it is worth it.  Ive worked out twice at the Patewood facility now and it appears that I will be sweating more these days.  They have a system called SPEEDFLEX with is a series of machines that help to increase speed and stamina while shredding fat.  I’m not a trainer, but I’m hearing that it helps build fast muscle.

On Thursday morning I had my first session.  I worked out with 4-5 other people.  This is the first time I had worked out with a group since starting Chase’s challenge about a year ago.  It’s kinda cool to be able to compare your workout, strength and endurance to others around you. It’s not a race, but its something to at least measure yourself by.  If everyone around you is passing out and you’re still standing…that’s a good thing right? :)  We did a series of 12 SPEEDFLEX machines.  Each machine performs a different task and after you hit all of them, you’ve pretty much done a full body workout.  We did each machine for 30 seconds.  The goal was to do as many reps on each machine as you could in that time.  After the 30 seconds, you moved on to the next machine with no rest between sets.  We did 2 rounds of this and I have to tell you I felt pretty whooped about half way thru the 2nd round.  It’s a pretty cool workout.  If you’re interested in something like this, google speedflex.  The are exclusive in this area to the ASI centers.

This morning, Tuesday, our trainer Daniel made me and one other guy wear heart rate monitor straps under our shirts.  These monitors displayed and recorded our endurance levels.  Essentially, they monitored our heart rates and gave us a percentage of where we were at as far as our endurance and heart rate.  I got up to about 90% and kept it there for about 15 minutes.  The cool part about it was that you could look up at any of the TVs that were on in the facility and see what percentage you were at.  Pretty neat stuff.

As I learn more-I’ll share more with you.  I’m confident that this new workout is going to help me get closer to my “shirtless summer” goal!  I can already feel the effects 2 workouts in!

More later.  Plus some random videos later this week.