Tonight on The Biggest Loser… Masterclass, yay!

And a mountain climbing dude will be there. To climb one of those static rock wall things. His name is Lincoln Hall? The name isn’t ringing any bells but I guess he’s famous in circles of people who climb mountains?

First part of Masterclass tonight will be with Michelle and Shannan, as usual.

Last week’s training session was mostly about the front parts of your core, this week will be about the back part of your core.
Michelle says everyone needs a strong core for picking up groceries or kids or even just getting out of a car. If you’ve had back pains before it could be because you’ve not had enough strength in your core.
Shannan wants them all to have stronger cores because they’re all going to be running a marathon. More than three times your body weight gets shot up through your legs while running, Shannan tells everyone.

Michelle doesn’t think you need gym equipment to work on your core, you can do core exercises anyway. You can even sit on a fit ball behind your desk!
Jarna’s had some back pain in the past so Michelle’s going to show her how to sit properly on the fit ball and then she’ll sit there for the rest of the session.
Jarna’s told to sit up straight, imagine a piece of string pulling your head upwards. Pull in from the abs, lift your chest to seperate the ribs, tilt your head so you’re looking straight ahead and pull your chin/s in. By doing that you’re using the right muscles to help you sit correctly.

Michelle says she’ll keep an eye on Jarna throughout the rest of the session and if she starts slouching Michelle will get her to do 20 pushups!

Next up is some exercises they can do at home to do a lot of strengthening stuff at home.
Shannan is told to hit the deck. Face down, pull your bellybutton towards your back. Keep hands on the ground and raise your chest upwards. Second level you lift up your arms at same time. Easy!
Next version is on the fit ball. Michelle demonstrates this. It’s much the same, just bent over a fit ball. And a lot hotter than when Shannan was doing it.
Next level of that one is to squeeze your arms up behind you while rising, trickier. But when the muscles get strong enough you’ll find you’ll naturally sit up in chairs a lot better.

Shannan has to demonstrate the next one as well. Hands and knees. Lift right arm out in front of you while lifting the left leg out behind you, then bring them back in without touching the ground. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Second level is to lift your leg out sideways to your body to increase the intensity. And you can swap sides to strengthen the other side. If Michelle could give office workers one exercise, this would be it because it works both the back and front of the core.
Michelle suggests you could do this exercise at home in amongst the commercials. Surprised that tidbit made it in to the version that aired, can’t imagine Channel 10 like that idea!
Shannan says two or three sets of 10-15 reps, two or three times a week. It’s that simple. The muscles in your back are the same as all the other muscles so they need training too.

Jarna can already feel the workout on her fit ball apparently, even though it’s only been a few minutes. Nice!

Janella the chef is on after an ad break. Chris will be giving her a hand today.
Janella asks them what they think is the most ordered sandwich in Australia? Caitlin guesses a ham/cheese/tomato sandwich. Janella says that’s right, a toasted one in fact.
Joe says he used to think that was a healthy option, it has tomato in it!

Chris is asked to guess how many calories are in the sandwich. He guesses 290 calories. Jarna says 240-250?
There’s 553 calories in the sandwich.

So Janella’s going to make a healthy alternative with 330 calories instead. A chicken and pumpkin mountain bread wrap!
She’s going to make 4 wraps so she has 600 grams of chook. She slices it through the middle to help it cook much faster.
Spray of oil on the grilling plate thingy and they’re going to char grill the chicken. Caitlin may need a droolbucket.
Slices of pumpkin are going in another pan. Can cook it any way that’s healthy, just so long as it’s cooked.

“This is mountain bread. It’s your friend.” 70 calories per slice. It’s soft and nice rather than hard and crunchy like other flat breads can be. It’s really easy to digest, Janella says, and great for food on the run.

Janella’s using half an avocado between all 4 slices because it’s high in monounsaturated fat, which is the good one, apparently. It’s more a food for your “maintenance” time, which I gather is when they’ve already lost all the weight they need to and are looking more to keep the weight off.
Also adding some cucumber and red onion to the wraps.

Michelle says the good thing about making your own sandwiches is you end up spending much less money for a much healthier sandwich.
I would think the most important thing is you’re not at the mercy of what ingredients the sandwich shop has available. And not at the mercy of dodgy food safety standards!

Janella adds some sprouts to the wraps, which she says are really good for you. And aren’t rabbit food.
Janella is clearly a liar liar pants on fire.

Janella gets Chris to wrap up the wraps. He does okay. Janella says some people use two wraps because sometime one splits. Which happens to Chris on the second he tries.
Janella cuts and packs some away in containers and then it’s taste test time.

… first thing Chris does is pulls out the cucumber much to the disgust of everyone, with many calls of “just eat it!”
He eventually declares it delicious, sans-cucumber. And you can really taste the avocado. He said that like it’s a good thing.

Next up is Wayne as assistant. And underneath the lid of the next dish? A king sized meat pie. Yum!
Janella asks how many calories and Wayne automatically says 450. Janella says that’s usually right but as this is a king size it’s actually 500 calories. 500 delicious, lovely calories, right Janella?
It’s not just the calories that are a problem though, there’s lots of salt and various unnatural things and “really nasty meat.. stuff.” Wayne hopefully asks if it’s lean mince and Janella says noooo…

So what is Janella suggesting as an alternative?

Quiche.

Fucking quiche.

Apparently Wayne likes quiche and is thus clearly not actually a man.

Anchovies are eight and a half calories each though they’re high in sodium. Much to everyone’s disgust. Janella says you won’t really taste them in the quiche it’ll just add a nice salty taste.
Janella also chops the florets off a broccoli like she did to the cauliflower last week, then chops the stem of the broccoli up nice and small as it’s full of nutrients apparently.

180 grams of tuna which is 180 calories also goes into the pan. Along with some cannelini beans which are super good for you and will clean your digestive system out nicely, Janella says.
Whole bunch of other stuff gets added. Two eggs to make the quiches hold together. You can use more to make them stick together better but because they’re watching their egg intakes, just the two.

To make them into quiche-like shapes they squish them into a muffin tray. No pastry since that’ll help cut down on the calorie count. Put them in the oven for about 10-15 minutes to cook the egg in them and brown them up a little. They’ve already been cooking in the pan a bit so the rest of it doesn’t really need much cooking.
Wayne has a taste test and he says he likes them. I think there was a “but I’d prefer a meat pie” in there, too.

After another ad break Shannan says they’ve got a very special guest today. He’s one of Australia’s most well known mountaineers and he’s climbed to the peak of Mt Everest. He also went down in “The Death Zone” and is the only person to live through it. He’ll be a wealth of information on what it takes to battle through things.
And yes, as Mr Voiceover Man said, it’s Lincoln Hall.
He’s missing the ends of all his fingers, so he must be a very serious explorer because that happens to many of them.

When standing on top of Mt Everest he actually looked up, he says, and it’s actually pretty dark above you, a really deep blue, and you can see “forever” from up there.
Apparently it’s an amazing quirk of fate that Everest is about as high as you can get, any higher than that and people wouldn’t be able to get there.

They only spent 20 minutes at the summit and they turned back to head down as another group of climbers were on their way up, too. And they didn’t want to get stuck up there in a traffic jam kind of situation.
On the way back down he was unclipping himself from the rope to move down to the next bit but he passed out between clips. And it wasn’t just exhaustion it was a cerebral edema, which is pressure on your brain from it retaining fluid. Because your skull doesn’t expand and you start to go delirious and it puts pressure on your spinal cord and so on. The only way to survive that is to get back down from that altitude as quickly as possible. And he was only about 50 metres from the summit when he passed out.
The hardest part of the climb on the north face is the “second step” apparently. It’s where a lot of people turn back or die.

But his instincts kicked in and helped him get down past that point and he abseiled down a cliff fairly quickly and came back to his senses and got down to the sherpa camp. He was trying to talk to them but he couldn’t talk and then he was just lying there with no apparent pulse or breathing, no response to stimulus – they poked him in the eye! – and he’s just lying there all glassy eyed.
So the expedition leader figures he’s dead as 11 other people had died that season alone and he was looking to be number 12.
The word went out to everyone in the world and his family and he’s been left for dead on the side of the mountain as the sun is setting – was a beautiful sunset, Lincoln says. Causing some laughter from everyone and him to say we all like a nice sunset!

Finally, some time in the middle of the night, it’s pitch black and he suddenly wakes back up to full lucidity and he’s feeling around trying to find his gear or his pack – he couldn’t find his pack because the sherpas had taken it because he was dead and dead guys don’t need packs!
He was feeling around and couldn’t feel anything which was disorienting him but he eventually realised the reason he couldn’t feel anything was because his fingers were all frozen and they felt like wood. Not just really, really cold, completely frozen!
Lincoln says his first step was to make it through the night. Which sounds really easy, but if he even let his head droop for a second and drift into sleep he’d never wake up again. And the thing that drove him to stay awake was thinking of getting back to his family.
To keep his mind occupied he stuck his hands under his armpits and started rocking back and forth slowly, then quicker, and so his mind was occupied by thinking of when he’d stop his rotation, or if he’d do this one a little faster.

Anyway, first thing in the morning it’s just getting light and he sees four guys coming up the mountain – the last guys who’d be attempting it this season.
They’d been warned to expect his dead body on the way up, but there he was sitting there rocking backwards and forwards. And what was the first thing he said to them? “I imagine you’re surprised to see me here?”
One of the guys started to cry because they could see he was on the verge of death.

Reaching the summit was an amazing thing, Lincoln says, but the fantastic part was what he learned afterwards. What he managed to push through.

Shannan asks him what it was that kept him going. Lincoln says you can all do a lot more than you think you can, you just have to believe in yourself. Not just saying the words, you have to believe it.
Lincoln says he had no idea what he’d do after getting through the night, but he got through the night by believing he’d do it. Shannan pipes up to say “control the controllables, see!”

Lincoln’s now going to have a go on the climbing wall that is actually one of those fancy rolling walls, not the static wall I thought it was. Cool!
Lincoln has about 60% usage in his hands, Shannan informs the group.
How many toes? He only has three toenails to cut. Lincoln says it’s easier to remember it that way.

Lincoln gets a big round of applause on his way out.

Another ad break and we’re back with Dr Norman Swan again.
Dr Swan’s talking about the mental side of things today so they’ve got a health psychologist in to talk about what drives them to eat, what might help them to stop eating, etc.
Dr Lenny Vartanian? They don’t spell his name for us, dangit!

Jarna’s still sitting on her fit ball.

Lisa’s an emotional eater, she says. But not just when she’s sad, she eats when she’s happy as well.

Then they finally put Dr Lenny’s name up on screen and I spelled it right. Excellent!

That’s a common story, Lenny says. Eating due to feelings. Dr Swan says people at home might be thinking those people have weak wills, all they need to do is stop eating.
Lenny enables the fatties some more by saying that that isn’t the case it all.
Lenny says self control is something we all can exercise to certain degrees but when it’s exercised over and over and over again then it’s hard to control yourself in certain situations.

Rick says before he came on the show he didn’t know he was an emotional eater, he didn’t even know what it was. He went through some bad things (his GF’s miscarriage last year) and he started eating to deal with it then.

Lenny then says that if your emotional eating helped you survive what you might not have otherwise survived, then that’s okay. (?!) But you’re over that now and you need to be dealing with things in a more healthy manner now.

Phoebe’s family gets together every week or so, cousins and all, and some people bring the meats and some bring the salads and the potatoes and they all bring desserts and so their family gatherings are all based around food, not going out and playing soccer or anything.

Dr Lenny then talks about social situations where the cook wants to make sure they’ve got enough food that their guests don’t go hungry but the guests also feel like they can’t turn away the food.
Apparently this can all be solved by talking about the food situation beforehand and agreeing to only have “just enough” food.
Or people could just say no to thirdsies and not get offended when people say no…

Dr Swan says it’s a bit like being an alcoholic, you’ve got to maintain the self control all the time. Dr Lenny says it comes down to planning. Plan ahead so you’re not stuck trying to sort things out on the spot.
David is asked what he’ll be doing about strategies when he gets home and he says the first thing he’ll be doing is removing all the junk food from the house because he’s always been one of those people who, if it’s in the house, he’ll eat it!

Shannon wants to know he’ll be able to go to a restaurant and be okay with people eating things he isn’t allowed to eat and be okay with that.

Dr Lenny’s suggestion when you get served a huge meal at a restaurant that is much larger than any reasonable person should be eating? Ask the waiter to split it in half and you’ve got your lunch sorted for the next day…
Or you could just deal with it and do some bloody exercise the next day.

He also says if you’re thinking about having something to eat because you think you’re hungry, recall the last time you ate, are you really hungry? Maybe you’re just bored?
I’m bored right now. Can I have a cookie please Dr Lenny?

The weather’s a bit on the rainy side for the Masterclass challenge. So it’s clearly a day to be indoors. Hayley asks them what they’d normally do on such a day? Sit on the couch and watch TV or DVDs?
Yes, yes I would!

But instead they’re going to be hitting the gym!
And they won’t need expensive gym equipment to do it. They’re going to create their own equipment from what they have lying around the house and garage.

Scattered around them in the big shed is a bunch of “worthless stuff” like old couches, plant pots, some wicker chairs, ladders, etc.
They’re going to turn some of the stuff into a home gym to give themselves a total body workout.
Each couple will get an area of the body to work on and they’ll get their own stack of junk to create their equipment with. They’ll need to make two exercises for their area of the body and then afterwards demonstrate their equipment.

And Michelle and Shannan will be judging who wins the Masterclass Shield. Rick and Joe have won two weeks in a row, can anyone topple them?
Shannan and Michelle will be judging based on creativity and how good a workout their equipment provides for their selected body part… which they’re pulling out of a bag.
Red – Arms
Yellow – Legs
Purple – Shoulders
Blue – Dynamic Core
Grey – Chest
Green – Back

They have fifteen minutes to devise two safe, efficient and effective exercises with their gear.

Joe’s actually recreating regular gym equipment with what they’ve got. He says he’s a handyman and doesn’t mind making things for himself at home so this is right up his alley!

Many of their inventions seem to be making liberal use of duct tape. Awesome.

Caitlin and Daina have impressed Michelle and Shannan by making an exercise with their tires that also doubles as cardio, not just strengthening legs and improving agility.

Time’s up a little too quickly for some of them. Some of the others probably could have done their’s in 5 minutes!

Chris and Shannon’s equipment is the one piece of bench thing but you use it two ways, reverse and inclined situps.
Their second piece of equipment is just a shelf to put your feet up on while doing crunches.
Then when you want to increase the intensity you can hold a phonebook up above your head while doing your crunches, which Michelle and Shannan both love the idea of.

Joe and Rick’s first piece of gear is pretty much just a simple pulley to lift a bucket full of sand up and down.
Second bit is two chairs to support your upper body while you do those lifting-your-chest-off-the-ground exercises Shannan and Michelle demonstrated earlier this episode. They also have water bottles for weights or elastic bands for even more resistance.

Jarna says they’ve gone for the simple, no construction approach, the you’ve just brought the shopping in style approach. Shannan asks if Jarna’s trying to sell him on it.
Their first piece of equipment is just two recyclable shopping bags with bottles of water in them to lift up and down. Then one big jug of water to lift. Then another bag full of bottles lifting while resting a knee up on a couch.

Phil and David’s setup is very “old school”, Michelle says. It’s just a bench press rig, essentially. A bar with two big jugs of water on either end of it while lying back on a bench.
Second piece of equipment is a park bench which you lie on while raising bags of bottles up into the air.

Shannan says he knows it’s a bit funny to be doing all this but it’s genuinely the kind of thing he’d do himself if he’s away from home and wherever he is doesn’t have a gym.

The Yellow girls are next. They have tires setup in the old school army training jumping from one foot to the other thing.
Second piece of equipment is just two drawers duct taped together and if you want to increase the intensity you can hold a log over your shoulders while stepping up. Shannan corrects Caitlin’s form while she’s demonstrating by saying you should make sure to put your whole foot up on the step.
Michelle is very impressed because leg training is her favourite and they’ve come up with some good ones.

Wayne and Phoebe’s station is tricep dips, which is propping yourself up on your arms behind you and raising and lowering your body.
Their second station is just a standard bar with bagged bottles on the end of it, raising it up to your shoulders and back down.

Now they all have to do a circuit of all the gear!

Shannon’s really impressed by the home made gear but particularly David and Phil’s, which he says he got the most out of.

Rick’s got a problem, however. The tires that Caitlin and Daina used are a little small, and Rick has enormous feet, so he’s having to do it all on his tiptoes.

Chris is finding the back workout to be the hardest. Phoebe’s struggling hard to do the situps on an incline, Caitlin’s impressed by Lisa and Jarna’s workout. Basically impressed people all round.

But there can be only one Masterclass winner.
Michelle says every exercise worked and they all hit the simple/effective brief. She’s actually envious because it’s the sort of workout she’d be happy to do for herself.
Shannan was impressed not only by their inventiveness but by how much they’ve clearly learned about their bodies as they were all hitting their right areas.

But the winner today is Caitlin and Daina!

And now Masterclass is over for another week. Booooo!

Sunday night… They’re going to get to use the rock climbing machine, cool!
The Yellow Girls will be facing off against all the other couples. With a two kilogram weight advantage they really ought to be fine… but can the others pull together and come out with a win?