independently fit
Jun. 9th, 2013 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedusorI just finished taking an "Independent Fitness" course at the community college a few blocks from my house. The class met four times on Saturday mornings over three months, and the rest of it was just individual workouts recorded on a timecard at the front desk of the gym. I took it mostly to hold myself accountable for the workouts I was already doing.
Those of you who follow me on other social networks know exactly what I thought about the dietary part of the course--which, having just gone to check the course schedule, I now realize was not included in the description of the class. Basically, she spent half an hour lecturing us about the evils of the typical American diet and throwing out "SCARY, SCARY" obesity statistics with wide eyes and bogey hands, and then described in detail an ideal diet that she claimed would solve all these problems. It was my diet. I know this because we also had to keep a diet diary for three days and break it down into protein, complex carbs, simple carbs, saturated fats, and unsaturated fats. The only thing she had to say about mine was that I don't eat enough carbs. Aside from being almost certainly false, this did not address the flaw in her theory about a magical cure for obesity, given that my diet hasn't significantly changed in about five years and I've been exercising regularly for quite a while now. I wish people could just learn to accept that bodies are different, and health doesn't look the same for everyone. Sigh.
But the main part of the course, the workouts, was good. There were fitness evaluations at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the quarter, and it was neat to see those numbers change. I'd never done any kind of flexibility test, and was surprised to find myself at the top of the charts from the beginning. (I guess most people can't do this?) One of the tests was a one-legged wall sit, of which I managed to endure all of six seconds the first day and made it over half a minute by the end.
My relationship with exercise has never been as strong, positive or negative, as a lot of people's seem to be. I was pretty active as a kid, and less active after my family moved to Kansas City, where it was less bike-friendly and there weren't regular juggling gatherings. I played hours of DDR every day for a while, which produced enough sweat that it probably counted as exercise. I think my first attempt at working out for the sake of working out was when I tried Couch-to-5k when I was fourteen or fifteen. That went fine until I got shin splints a few weeks in, and no amount of stretching seemed to solve the problem, so I gave up. I got a membership at my community college's gym when I was sixteen, much to the consternation of the guy in charge who tried to tell me the age limit was seventeen due to health concerns (Julia used Doctor's Note combined with Endless Badgering! IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE), but it was fifty bucks a semester and treadmill access wasn't worth it to me. I've sort of always done crunches and pushups intermittently, and I used the student gym at Clark sometimes, and I've never disliked any of it, but I never really got into a routine.
Last fall I decided I wanted to learn how to lift weights, and took a course for that. It was so awesome I didn't even mind the 8am start time. For the first time, exercise felt like it emphasized what I could do instead of what I couldn't. Working out felt like accomplishing something concrete, instead of just doggedly going nowhere. For someone with competence insecurities as deep as mine, that made a huge difference. Weightlifting is exercise that I actively enjoy, instead of just doing because I vaguely feel like I should.
For this course, I was aiming for three workouts per week of one to two hours each, and since my weightlifting routines don't take that long, I started using the elliptical for a while at the end of each workout. And this weird thing happened--each time, after I'd been at it for about sixteen or seventeen minutes, I broke out of that "meh, whatever" mindset and got to a point where I just wanted to do more, faster, harder. I think maybe I was just too out of shape to get there before, or I didn't stick with it long enough or use hard enough settings. But now that I know that place exists (for me personally--I knew other people experienced it) it's a lot easier to want to work out.
So now I have a regular routine of exercise activities I like, arranged in a way that works for me, that usually leaves me happy and sore in the right ways. It's taken a while to learn my body this well, to shake off the culturally-ingrained idea that exercise is supposed to be unpleasant and figure out what works for me (weights! yay!) and what doesn't (running, blech). But I guess just-shy-of-23 isn't the worst possible age to have this all figured out.
Those of you who follow me on other social networks know exactly what I thought about the dietary part of the course--which, having just gone to check the course schedule, I now realize was not included in the description of the class. Basically, she spent half an hour lecturing us about the evils of the typical American diet and throwing out "SCARY, SCARY" obesity statistics with wide eyes and bogey hands, and then described in detail an ideal diet that she claimed would solve all these problems. It was my diet. I know this because we also had to keep a diet diary for three days and break it down into protein, complex carbs, simple carbs, saturated fats, and unsaturated fats. The only thing she had to say about mine was that I don't eat enough carbs. Aside from being almost certainly false, this did not address the flaw in her theory about a magical cure for obesity, given that my diet hasn't significantly changed in about five years and I've been exercising regularly for quite a while now. I wish people could just learn to accept that bodies are different, and health doesn't look the same for everyone. Sigh.
But the main part of the course, the workouts, was good. There were fitness evaluations at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the quarter, and it was neat to see those numbers change. I'd never done any kind of flexibility test, and was surprised to find myself at the top of the charts from the beginning. (I guess most people can't do this?) One of the tests was a one-legged wall sit, of which I managed to endure all of six seconds the first day and made it over half a minute by the end.
My relationship with exercise has never been as strong, positive or negative, as a lot of people's seem to be. I was pretty active as a kid, and less active after my family moved to Kansas City, where it was less bike-friendly and there weren't regular juggling gatherings. I played hours of DDR every day for a while, which produced enough sweat that it probably counted as exercise. I think my first attempt at working out for the sake of working out was when I tried Couch-to-5k when I was fourteen or fifteen. That went fine until I got shin splints a few weeks in, and no amount of stretching seemed to solve the problem, so I gave up. I got a membership at my community college's gym when I was sixteen, much to the consternation of the guy in charge who tried to tell me the age limit was seventeen due to health concerns (Julia used Doctor's Note combined with Endless Badgering! IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE), but it was fifty bucks a semester and treadmill access wasn't worth it to me. I've sort of always done crunches and pushups intermittently, and I used the student gym at Clark sometimes, and I've never disliked any of it, but I never really got into a routine.
Last fall I decided I wanted to learn how to lift weights, and took a course for that. It was so awesome I didn't even mind the 8am start time. For the first time, exercise felt like it emphasized what I could do instead of what I couldn't. Working out felt like accomplishing something concrete, instead of just doggedly going nowhere. For someone with competence insecurities as deep as mine, that made a huge difference. Weightlifting is exercise that I actively enjoy, instead of just doing because I vaguely feel like I should.
For this course, I was aiming for three workouts per week of one to two hours each, and since my weightlifting routines don't take that long, I started using the elliptical for a while at the end of each workout. And this weird thing happened--each time, after I'd been at it for about sixteen or seventeen minutes, I broke out of that "meh, whatever" mindset and got to a point where I just wanted to do more, faster, harder. I think maybe I was just too out of shape to get there before, or I didn't stick with it long enough or use hard enough settings. But now that I know that place exists (for me personally--I knew other people experienced it) it's a lot easier to want to work out.
So now I have a regular routine of exercise activities I like, arranged in a way that works for me, that usually leaves me happy and sore in the right ways. It's taken a while to learn my body this well, to shake off the culturally-ingrained idea that exercise is supposed to be unpleasant and figure out what works for me (weights! yay!) and what doesn't (running, blech). But I guess just-shy-of-23 isn't the worst possible age to have this all figured out.
