FireMike

Yesterday morning my room mate and I (pictured w me in AVI) trained back together, while at the gym we ran into a newbie who happens to be a friend of my room mate’s. His name is Mike (Big Mike actually), he’s roughly 360lbs maybe more, out of shape. He recently found out he is gonna be a father for the first time and decided he needs to get into shape to be able to have the active envolvment in his childs raising. Very noble and honorable reason to get into shape. Well he warmed up by doing a fast pace walk on the treadmill before having a personal training session with one of the trainers at the gym. It was to be a leg day for Big Mike, so first he’s doing some leg extensions, reps of 20. My room mate and I had finished our back session and were working forearms, we began joking with Mike a little about how pale he was and telling him not to worry there was two of the best paramedics around in the gym, everything would be fine… Little did we know that we were going to be needed in a few moments to come. Big Mike was done with extensions and getting ready to do some leg pressing, he was extremely diaphoretic (this didn’t make us suspicious of anything bc he’s a big guy and working out should make him sweat profusely). He had just told the trainer he was working with that he was feeling dizzy and that he hadn’t eaten anything this morning, and then all we heard was the THUD of a 300 plus lb man rolling off the leg press and hitting the floor, out, unconscious. We instantly dropped what we were doing to get over to him, he was only out for maybe 30 seconds and very confused when we were able to arouse him. His eyes were jumping, he was pale as pale gets with about a lb of sweat on him. My room mate went to get his first in bag from his car, I got Big Mike some gatorade and gave him some of my Almond stash I keep in my gym bag since he hadn’t ate before training. We assessed him, his BP 92/68 (this isn’t good, very narrow pulse pressure meaning lack of perfusion of the muscle’s and vital organs) his Blood Glucose….undetainably low (which means less than 30 on the glucometer we had) We gave him a tub of oral glucose since he was alert and oriented and had him consume the 32oz gatorade and then filled the bottle up with water and had him consume, as his BP was low mostly likely bc of dehydration. We got Big Mike back on his feet and he said he was feeling alot better. Then he showed how dedicated he was to achieving his goals, he didn’t want to stop despite our advice. We were able to convince him to go walk on the treadmill for a little bit and see how he was feeling afterwards. He did another mile and then decided that lifting prob wasn’t the greatest idea in the world right now. Later last night he called our house and we all had a good laugh at his expense. We’ve all had this happen we told him and not to worry about as his pride was busted a little, and its true, anyone who trains intense has fallen syncopal before from pushing themselves past that threshold, I have multiple times following squats, deadlifts, and heavy benching. I prop Big Mike on his dedication and desire to achieve, and feel confident that he will be one of the few who follows thru with it and converts from a unhealthy life to a lifestyle focuse on health and fitness on whatever level he chooses.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 8:18 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.