Eighth day of fitness.

Would you believe I actually not only got to the gym, but tried a new exercise? They put in a stair climber machine a month or so ago and I've never seen anyone using it. So I hopped on it and tried it out. Now I know why no one uses it. It's like taking the stairs two at a time--you really have to extend to do the motion, and I didn't see any way of shortening up the stride. This was pretty tough going, and I have long legs! I can't imagine someone with shorter legs working on this machine. But added to the difficulty of the movement, it *hurt*--lots more actual muscle work because it really was like climbing stairs. My heart rate went up high right from the start and I had to cut back the difficulty level--I started it at 5 (on the elliptical and recumbant bikes I put the difficulty level at 9 or 10, so I figured 5 was a good starting point since I didn't know the machine), but ended up decreasing it down to 3 so my heart could keep up. But the calorie burn was terrible--it felt much worse than the treadmill or elliptical, where I can pretty reliably burn about 10 calories per minute. But on this thing I was only averaging about 8 or 9 calories per minute, which doesn't sound like that big a difference, but it adds up. I only burned 220 calories in the 25 minutes I was on the thing, but I was sweating like a pig and my heart was racing and my legs screaming. I got on the bicycle for 10 minutes after that to bring my heart rate down and burn some more calories (even the cool down cycle was difficult on this thing--level one was almost no resistance, but you still were taking the stairs two at a time!), then only had time for a couple of weight machines at the end. The frustrating thing was that I wanted to do some upper body stuff because my legs were already thoroughly worked out, but there were a group of skanky guys using all of the upper body machines (what is it with that? Why are guys so obsessed with building up their arms and chests but you almost never see them on the inner thigh or hamstring machines?) so I did lower body stuff. Probably a good thing--this morning my legs don't ache as I expected them to, so I think the weights at the end were a good cool down/stretch instead of adding to the burden!