After signing up with my gym, I scheduled an official first workout with a trainer (who I am currently calling Lady Trainer). Like my first conversations with Dude Trainer, the idea was to figure out my baseline and set goals.
Lots and lots of good happened at that workout, I’d say. When I said my goal was NOT to lose weight, but to get sweaty/improve flexibility/tune up, Lady Trainer said “I love that!” There were a lot of numbers-based goals nevertheless, but Lady Trainer checked in with me to make sure that the numbers we were picking were ones I’m comfortable with.
Lady Trainer also gave me my favorite soundbite: “Performance over looks.” As mentioned before, I’d be lying if I said that looking a certain way isn’t part of my goal, but it meant a lot to me that she framed it as “improve performance first, let looks change as a result” rather than “work towards an image-based goal.”
Less great, on a personal level: in order to set numbers-based goals, we did a bunch of measurements. I talk a good game about accepting my body, but when I weighed in at slightly heavier than last week, with a higher body fat percentage, I felt pretty not great about that. I can rationalize the slightly higher weight with natural fluctuations; the body fat percentage kind of fucks with my head. How did that go up when I worked out four days last week? Does that number really fluctuate that much, too?
Not to mention standing there in front of a mirror in workout clothes getting measured gave me plenty of time to stare at the parts of my body that I do hate.
Neutral: Lady Trainer pushed REALLY hard for me to buy supplements from the gym. I don’t hold that against her -- the pitch was so clearly scripted and so clearly part of her job. Which isn’t to say that I don’t believe her when she says she likes the products and recommends them for XYZ reasons! I just also know an upsell when I hear it.
She also pointed out parts of my posture that I need to work on -- a slight anterior tilt to the pelvis, shoulders a little forward -- so I spent all of yesterday trying to pull my shoulders back and feeling like Charlize Theron doing her murderwalk.
Second workout (leg day!) is today; third workout (nutrition? Less psyched for that one) to come.
Since deciding to join a gym, I have done the following workouts:
Saturday, 1/6: I go in for a trial training session with Trainer Dude. 10 minutes or so of cardio warmup and stretching on my own, then my trainer suggests we do a full body set with free weights. (I’m pretty sure it was a HIIT routine? He called it something like isometric or biometric. Something-metric.) I am like “hell yeah, fuck me up, let’s do it.”
The last part of the routine involves fifteen reps of jumping up onto a stool, immediately after doing a set of step-ups. (”We’re gonna burn those legs.”) I am very short. The stool is a little higher than my knees. I try and jump ... and bark the shit out of my shin. Trainer grabs a much lower bar for me to jump over, and I complete the routine. He tells me to take a quick break, and I head for the water fountain.
And suddenly feel like I’m going to pass out.
SMASH CUT TO: That morning, as I finish my first cup of coffee and think I’m going to go work out, I should probably drink more water -- then shrug and pour myself a second cup.
Past Me is an idiot. Past Me knows, from Past-Past Me, that I am prone to fainting when dehydrated. Past-Past Me has collected a wealth of stories about passing out that she finds hilarious and everyone around her finds concerning. Past Me drank the coffee anyway.
After several minutes of me sitting on the floor by the water fountain with my head down, making sure my ears have stopped ringing, Trainer Dude comes to check on me. Though I assure him I’m starting to feel better, he sends me home. Fair play to you, Trainer Dude.
Monday, 1/8: Take two with Trainer Dude. This time we work through a basic routine on weight machines: chest, shoulders, lats, bi- and triceps, hamstrings. Trainer Dude apologizes several times throughout for pushing me too hard before. I, meanwhile, keep trying to push myself too hard -- “Let’s try another five pounds!” I chirp, before hitting my failure point 75% of the way through my second set on each machine.
(Trainer Dude apologizes yet again. I assure him it was because I didn’t hydrate. We agree that we have to trick ourselves into drinking water. I contemplate the genius of La Croix, as the latest step in Big Water’s quest to get all of us into spending money on providing our bodies with basic needs.)
When we get to the incline sit-up bench and he tells me “Do as many as you can,” I take him at his word and show off by powering through 35 sit-ups. I regret this when he tells me to do a second set, and only make it through 15.
The next day, though, I get one of my favorite feelings: good-sore. My muscles are telling me I worked, and I feel accomplished!
Wednesday, 1/10: My official First Workout with my new trainer, Trainer Gal, is scheduled for next week, but I know that if you wait more than a couple of days between lifting you lose progress. After work I head to the gym.
The vibe is very different in the after-work hours than in the middle of the day, unsurprisingly. All the lockers are full. Three-quarters of the people there look like dedicated fitness-junkies: fashionable athletic wear or marathon participant T-shirts, a sheen of sweat, and a self-confident air as they move from exercise to exercise. The other quarter look more like me: the people with the slightly hesitant posture looking around for what to do next. All of us, newbies and veterans, kind of avoid eye contact -- although I do wave at Trainer Dude from the incline sit-up bench, when I see him showing another prospective newbie around.
Although I’m trying to live by the maxim that there are no dumb questions, and that talking to people is not an imposition, I pretty much keep to myself and figure out how to adjust the machines on my own when I need to. I catch sight of myself in a mirror while I’m doing tricep extensions and feel like a child. The men working out around me all have ten to twelve inches of height on me and are j a c k e d. Me? I’m an itty-bitty girl in an oversized T-shirt struggling to maintain form through my last couple of reps.
But in spite of the awkward vibe, I feel pretty good by the time I finish up. I’ve pushed myself again, but not quite as hard as on Monday. I feel like I’m triangulating, overshooting and undershooting what I’m capable of to find where I’m challenged.
That said, even as I’m walking home, I can feel my muscles starting to complain. I expect to be sore tomorrow.
Today, Thursday 1/11, sitting up in bed SUCKED and I kind of perversely love it. You and me, abs. We’re going the distance.
Don't say losing weight. "I just want to tone up, y'know, and I really want to improve my flexibility."
"Have you ever had a fitness goal before?"
"I guess the only time I had a really specific, like, goal was in high school when I was doing karate and I was earning my black belt. But that was about progressing in rank, not hitting a particular, like, physical milestone."
"So why do you want to join a gym?"
I had a weird flashback when the trainer asked me that, to last year when I went in to my health provider for a behavioral health intake evaluation. They asked me about three times why I wanted to pursue therapy, and I tried to come up with a different answer each time, as if my previous one ("I'm . . . sad?") had been inadequate. Here I was on the other end of the spectrum. "So why do you want to join a gym?"
Don't say losing weight. "I, uh . . . I mean, like I said, I want to improve my flexibility, I used to be really flexible." Don't say losing weight. "And I just really want to sweat a couple times a week." Don't say losing weight. "And I work in theatre -- I do some writing, some stage managing, some acting -- so like, it's important to stay -- in shape, look a certain way."
It's the new year. People are coming to the gym to become new people. Specifically, many of them are coming to the gym to become smaller people. And I didn't know a lot about what I wanted out a fitness routine, besides a) routine and b) fitness, but I knew I didn't want to couch my new personhood in smaller or thinner personhood.
Partly this is political, part of a general feminist mindset that worth and health are not defined by size, especially not by how much space you don't take up in the world. Mostly it's for the good of my mental health. I've gone through periods in my life where the way I fed myself was kind of messed up. I don't have body dysmorphia, but like most American women, I think, I've absorbed a lot of the societal background radiation that says my body should be different than it is. (This actually came up in my therapy intake evaluation, too; they asked me something about eating or body image, and I said offhandedly that sometimes I hate my body, because like, doesn't everyone? Follow-up questions suggested that this answer concerned my interviewer. Oops.)
I work hard on not hating my body. I hardly ever weigh myself. I know that my shape and weight fluctuate over the month with my hormones and that helps me be at peace when I am in the throes of an "ugh ugh ugh" moment. I know what weights I've felt best at, what weights I've felt worst at, and what a reasonable weight for my frame and genetics is.
I did not want to go to a gym with a primary goal of losing weight. I wanted to make my goals anything but looks-based. But when I pressed, I had to admit: I kinda want to look like Daisy Ridley. I don't want to want to look thinner -- I want to want to look strong and comfortable and confident. I just . . . also want the abs of Gina Torres, the arms of Evangeline Lilly, and the butt of Chris Evans.
I’d be unstoppable!
But one thing I learned in the last year is that trying to get rid of an emotion, or thought, is a good way to make it come back stronger and worse than before. So I gotta take a second to acknowledge and accept: I do wish parts of my body looked different. Whether that desire comes from societal background radiation or what, it's a real thing I'm feeling.
So there I was with this trainer, and he weighed me and tested my body fat percentage, and I came in right where I would expect after a pretty sedentary month of holiday eating and drinking -- maybe a couple pounds higher than usual, but a perfectly normal weight for me, and a perfectly average healthy BMI. I told him again that my primary goals were being more active and more flexible, and that I didn't want to lose more than, say, five pounds from my initial weigh-in.
He ended up suggestion I lose more than ten. Granted, when I said again "I don't want to go below [x]," he assured me that we could change that goal and revised it slightly upwards -- but it was still below [x].
I was taken aback. Actually, I was kind of mad. Somewhat to my surprise, even having acknowledged that I wanted to tone up in order to look a certain way, I wasn't a fan of the idea that what I wanted for my body was wrong. I've had to tell trained health professionals that I understand my own cardiovascular system better than they think I do; I'm not going to let a dude who's known me thirty minutes tell me how much weight to lose.
I still went back for a couple of test training sessions with him. Once we were working with weights, he turned out to be a fine trainer (with only one hitch that was mostly my own stupid fault, a story for another post). I wanted to push; he made sure I didn't push so hard that I'd regret it.
And I did sign up for a gym membership. Emphasis on weigh-based goals and all, I decided the price and the proffered facilities were right. I did ask for a female trainer immediately, and I have my first session with her next week.
But this whole thing has gotten me thinking about what kind of goals gyms and fitness professionals could offer that aren't based on a number on a scale. I understand the desire to quantify exercise, I totally do. Qualititative metrics are hard to track, especially if you don't know which trainer you might be working with on a given day. But there are so many numbers you could offer to work on instead! Here's my shortlist:
Resting heart rate
# of reps/sets in a weightlifting regimen
Amount of weight in a weightlifting regimen
Number of workouts a week
Length of workout
Amount/intensity of cardio
Ability to do one single pull-up
I don’t have a super good button for this post, just one more point to make. My personal feelings about my personal human body and my personal fitness goals aside, I don’t want to say that it’s wrong to have a fitness goal of losing weight in a healthy way. It’s your body, so it’s your choice! Treat it in a way that makes your body and your brain feel good! For some people I know, that’s powerlifting or competitive bodybuilding. In fact, this came up during my initial conversation at this gym: the trainer showed me a picture of someone with about 10% body fat and said “That’s a little much for most ladies,” and I kind of wanted to be like “Bodybuilding is a legitimate form of self-expression for women as much as it is for men, my dude! You’re built like a brick and you don’t see me saying that’s a little much for most gentlemen, because I believe you’re living your best life and I aggressively support that!”
What I really want to do -- what I’ll probably write about in another post -- is work on breaking down the “active/thin = morally good, inactive/not thin = morally bad” correlation. I want to work on making “healthy” mean “healthy,” not “virtuous.”
I want to move my body because I like how I feel when I do, and I like being able to lift more weight than my size suggests, and I like being able to put my hands flat on the floor when I bend over, and I like how I look when I flex. For all the rest, let the chips fall where they may.
Hi! I joined a gym and I have a lot of thoughts about my personal fitness as a result! Before I start blogging in earnest, though, I wanted to outline a couple of my guiding principles:
I won’t post my actual weight. I may talk about my weight in relative terms -- e.g., I am this many pounds lighter or heavier than this other time -- but I have a tendency to fixate on numbers, so for my own wellbeing if nothing else, I’ll keep that off the blog.
I will be pretty blunt about where my brain and moods are at, both good and bad. Some days I love my body; some days I consider it a victory to just not hate my body. If I talk about feeling negative about my body in a post, I’ll tag it with “body negativity cw.”
I’m vegetarian! There’s a good chance I’ll talk about food on here, particularly about the ongoing challenges of getting enough protein, iron, and B vitamins in my diet. I’ll tag posts about food with either “food” or “nutrition,” probably.
Basically: self-compassion is the word! Please be compassionate to yourself! I’m working on it too, and this blog, where I can talk through my thoughts, is part of that. I’m delighted to have you along for the ride if the ride is fun for you, but if the ride stops being fun for you, please take the steps you deem necessary to keep yourself feeling comfortable.
I LOVE SELFIES AND GIFS, so get ready for that shit.
Here we go!
Oh, last note! The name “everydayperegrina” is a reference to that time in 2012 when I walked El Camino de Santiago with my family. I ate ... less well than usual (it’s tough to be a vegetarian in the land of jamón ibérico ), drank a lot of beer and wine, walked 8-12 miles a day, and felt and looked great. I may not be walking to Compostela now, but that kind of regular activity and zen, pleasurable mindset is kind of what I’m after, even doing higher intensity workouts.
So I fell off the wagon for a bit (although I've still been walking 5+ miles a day), but Emerald City ComiCon and conversations with a co-worker reminded me how much I missed strength training. Today marks day 15 of the 60 day Hero's Journey.
Today also marks day 2 of my current show's month-long tech process, which is already making me want to die a little. And let me tell you this: working twelve hours, mostly on my feet with a lot of problem-solving and heavy lifting, getting home after midnight, and then getting up to try and do a workout before doing it all again is giving me new ways to identify with the Bruce Waynes and Matt Murdocks and Peggy Carters of the fictional world. Especially since I'm sporting a bruised leg from an actor beaning me with a baseball and a knocked skull from running my face into the corner of a set piece last night. I think those comic book movies and shows are really downplaying the tiredness, the aches, and the vital necessity of coffee and extra protein that this kind of regimen requires.
But hey -- if the Batfamily can push through it, so can I.
Oops, I fell down on blogging. But not on workouts!
Day 4
Level: 3
Modifications: None
Motivational viewing material: Justice League Unlimited, I think
GOD I was sore, mostly in my back and shoulders. Not sure if it was from day 3′s punching or day 2′s arm-lifts. Thank goodness for a stretching day, in any case.
Day 5
Level: 3
Modifications: None
Motivational viewing material: Still more Justice League Unlimited
Day 6
Level: 3
Modifications: none, but my workout buddies and I all agreed that 100 reps felt like way too little -- we’d all gotten up to 400 reps throughout the day doing Darebee’s Fit Christmas program. I intended to do at least another 100 reps, but, uh, I went to see Star Wars instead.
Motivational viewing material: Now I’m on original flavor Justice League!
Today also included a lot of walking.
Day 7
Level: 3
Modifications: None
Motivational viewing material: If I had access to Star Wars, I would be watching some form of that. Hell, I would watch the prequels. But no, it’s more Justice League for now.
This one’s pretty similar to day 2, but it felt a lot easier, which is nice. It’s also really cold, so I’m not working up much of a sweat. Today also included hauling pies.
Day 3 of Darebee’s Foundations. Awwww yeah, punching things.
Level: 3
Modifications: None, although I think my front kicks were more like a ame geri than necessarily intended.
Motivational viewing material: Justice League Unlimited, “The Cat and the Canary”
Day 2 of Darebee’s Foundations! With a totally helpful workout buddy. Look how helpful that face is. Well, she does get me out on walks regularly.
Level: 3
Modifications: None, although I have no idea if I was doing the step back + step ups right
Motivational viewing: Constantine, haters to the left
I am feeling yesterday’s workout in my obliques from those leg lifts. Oof.
I gave my 1 gallon donation at @bloodworksnw today and got this snazzy pin! So it goes on my #geekchic vest (next to my Young Wizards Oath pin and just below the Wonder Woman pin, obviously). Thanks to the great staff at BWNW, as always, for a donation that was as smooth as I could ever ask for.
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