Move it to Lose it Class

Last week I bought a work-out shirt that has printed on the front: Everything Hurts and I’m Going to Die! I didn’t wear it to my first class at the YMCA on Monday but it sums up perfectly how I felt the day after the hour and a half class. Actually it wasn’t even a real class, it was an assessment of my strengths with a trainer one-on-one. She started out by timing me on a treadmill to see how far I could walk in a 15 minute period while still being able to talk, taking notes on my heart rate---.53 miles with a heart rate of 140 in case you’re comparing your own stats to mine. She (Julie) took notes on everything including my measurements, height, body weight, fat and muscle mass weight.

Weight-ins take place every Monday. Accountability, she said. Yup, I need that. Don’t want it but that’s what I signed up for and I intend to get my $150 worth out of this twice a week, seven weeks long class. She wants me to up my daily calories, though, by 300 calories! That seems so foreign to everything I know about dieting that I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that without the help of Starbucks and those naughty boys, Ben and Jerry. Eat more protein, ya, she mentioned that. I have to keep a food journal for the class. Been doing that right along with my Fitbit, I just need to learn how to print a hardcopy off my dashboard.

Julie was pleasantly surprised that my muscle mass was higher than she expected from a sedentary person. Many of her clients, she said, start half way down the scale from where I’m at. Of course, I can’t get cocky about that because two of my future classmates run half marathons. In fact of the three others in the class, I’m the only new comer. I haven’t met them yet but they’ve repeated this same ‘move it to lose it’ class several times so I expect I’ll be the only fatty-fatty-two-by-four among them. I told the trainer that I haven’t run since the '70s, that I don’t even remember how to do it. She was shocked and almost speechless at that admission, but it’s a fact. My secret goal---don’t tell Julie---is to be able to run by the end of summer. Yes, after just one class I’m thinking big, thinking about reenlisting until I’m a one-by-two instead of a two-by-four. That’s just me being me. When I took a marble carving class back in college, for example, I thought I’d be the next Michelangelo. I found out by the end of the semester that it’s a really hard---no pun intended---medium to work in. My brother has my unfinished, female torso in his front yard. I suspect I’ve set my goal too high again for my Spring of Getting Physically Fit but I live by the wisdom of Michelangelo who wrote, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” 

After the treadmill, Julie had me do “the circuit.” Apparently a circuit is a set of machines where you do repetitions for strength training. I was able to do them all. At one I was pulling 70 pounds and I impressed the heck out of myself. Of course, others can pull up to 200 on that machine but at least I wasn’t doing the lower, 25 or 50 weights so I was a happy camper. We had to skip several floor exercises using a giant beach ball designed to strengthen the core muscles because of my prosthetic knees and my extreme fear of not being able to get up off the floor. She gave me some other stuff for my core, saying there’s too much paperwork to do if I get hurt. 

I felt pretty good when I got home. It was the next day when I felt the pain. Julie said she didn’t want me to have so much pain the next day that I cursed her name but enough that her name came up. She achieved that goal. The only real downer came when at one point we were taking about what activities I do to keep active and she asked, "Do you go to church?" I answered, “No” and there was an awkward few moments where I thought about how inappropriate that question was in that setting. It gave me a flash-back to when I paid for private lessons with an art instructor 2-3 years ago and he talked religion the entire time. Too bad, I would have taken more than just the two classes if he hadn’t been wearing his church doctrine on his sleeve. 

I was fourteen the first time I faced weight issues. My mom took me to a doctor who gave me thyroid medication after blowing into his quack, thyroid measuring machine. I was sixteen or seventeen when she took me to a place that wrapped me up like a mummy with mineral soaked cloths and then baked me in a sauna. It makes you loss inches and pounds but it come backs in a few weeks. I couldn’t believe it last year when I saw that fad is coming back around again. When I was in my mid twenties I joined a gym, worked my tail off and had great results. In my sixties, I repeated the gym with great results. I’m hoping history will once again repeat itself. Stay tuned. ©