Love You, Love You Not

Love You, Love You Not

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The Adventures of Lazy Boy and Pain Girl in Y-land

"What are 3 things that keep you from exercising?" Megan and I were half-way through our newbie member survey for the YMCA trainer we were to meet when this joke of a question came up. I knew answering this by listing things I'd rather be doing would give me too many results. If I had to list actual people or things stopping me I'd have none. Scrambling to come up with ideas I came up with the following: 1. I'm lazy. 2. It's boring. 3. I'm lazy. Megan's list was something to the effect that: 1. It's painful. 2. It's not fun. 3. It's painful. With this Lazy Boy and Pain Girl emerged to triumph over the evils of Y-land.

We've done the gym route before. My wife had substantial success with one of those giant corporate 24-hr SUPERGYMS (the best way to say that last word is through gritted teeth in more of a growl than a clear enunciation). I did not and in the end I think I ruined it for her. It started out ok, I signed up for a not-cheap package of a dozen trainer sessions combined with the monthly fee for membership. My thought was, I've never used these torture, I mean work-out, machines before so I better have someone teach me how to do it properly. I was assigned a decent enough seeming young fellow whose actual name I can no longer remember. His prompt goal seemed to be to put me on his regimen including supplements, fancy shakes, and god knows what kind of diet. Chief among these was something called MuscleMilk. MuscleMilk is an easier name to remember him by than whatever his name really was so that's what we'll call him.

MuscleMilk was a master of misestimation. He underestimated the tenacity of my stubbornness and overestimated the level of ability I possessed for lifting heavy things. So basically what this meant was that when I told him I had no desire to buy special supplements and such (even though I had dramatically altered my diet to avoid fast food and eat more healthy food) and I nearly passed out twice due to intense work-outs, he gave up. I would make appointments to meet with him for workouts at 7 a.m. and he'd no-call and no-show for half of them. It happened a half-dozen times or more. I never learned a basic level of mastery of working out to get started and quickly gave up, disgusted after dealing with the rudeness of the staff when I'd ask if they'd seen my trainer every time he no-call/no-showed. Eventually we bought a treadmill for the home since that's the only machine I felt confident using and what I wound up doing for an hour every time MuscleMilk stayed home to sleep off his club weekend hangover.

Fast forward a year and Lazy Boy and Pain Girl have decided to do this. We checked out the facilities, met with the staff, and got a good feeling about the functionality of the nearby YMCA to accommodate our needs. With our membership we get 4 visits with a trainer as well as enrollment into a software work-out system called Activetrax. So far the combination of those as well as the layout of the place has been perfect! The trainer was a sprightly wee lass whose name I never did get. She mentioned being a dancer herself and you could tell she had an idea of how to work out correctly. She pointed out things that both Megan and I were doing wrong, gave tips on how to proceed, and explained how to use the software program to generate work-outs we understood to progress. The online program has a searchable database of foods that you can easily use to help track your diet and monitor your caloric/fat/protein intake. Not only that, but the machines actually have diagrams showing you how to use them. It's been a month and Lazy Boy has already lost 6 of the 20 lbs he wanted to lose and Lazy Boy knows better than to ask any Girl about their weight, but we both seem to be rocking our goals in Y-land.

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