I am in love. They are simply swoon-worthy. And as far as Brian knows, they were $15. They're completely justified as I keep telling myself that not only will we use them for our wedding cake, but to share dessert for years to come (except that I don't bake and Brian doesn't share dessert-- it is what it is).
So, back to sweating for the wedding (hm... coincidence that I'm sweating for the wedding while buying dessert forks? It is a tangled wedding web I weave...). Since I'm only meeting with him once a month, he's written up daily workouts for me to follow the other 29-30 days that I don't meet with him, which is super helpful. Helpful, yet intimidating, and a little bit overwhelming. I like my gym, but there are also a fair number of typical muscle-heads who look like they could squash my head with one bicep curl. So as much as I love strength training (seriously, I do), I've stuck to basic handweights and the machines in the past because I feel like a wimp doing my 10lb dumbbell presses next to someone who's curling 100lbs like it's air. After looking at my written-up routine, I realized that I had no idea what half of the exercises were, so I set up some time to meet with Billy to show me the ropes/prevent me from killing myself/someone else while attempting to workout.
I went in last night thinking we would just do a few reps at each machine and I would be on my way, but Mr. Trainer had other plans. I did full sets at every stop and was literally sweating for the wedding. It was intense, but I did impress myself with how quickly I caught on, and how less intimidating it all felt after we had gone through the machines. An additional plus? I'm totally feeling it today in the areas where I'm really looking to tone up (hello, chicken wings, the entire area between my knees and my waist, and that annoying spot on your chest between your arm and your boobs, otherwise known in my world as "potential bulge over top of wedding dress-- must eliminate!").
As positive as the impromptu session was, I have to be completely honest with y'all and share that I had an incident. One of the machines is the assisted pull-up/dip machine (top of my "That shit is scary-looking to attempt alone" machine list), so I was interested to see how exactly I was not only supposed to use it to exercise, but to gracefully mount the damn thing. Full disclosure, I've tried the machine before, a few years ago when we first joined our gym. The weight increments are weird, and I'd obviously never tried it before, so I set the weight to 140, climbed up, and was flying through the exercise. Like literally moving so fast, my hair was whipping in the gym-wind. I didn't find out until later that the machine uses counterbalanced weights, so the higher the weight, the easier the workout, because you're basically lifting zero weight. Whoopsie.
So Mr. Trainer sets the weight for 20lbs less than I currently weigh, hops on, and breezes through multiple reps in both the pull-up and the dip. This would be the correct way to do it/how my trainer looked/how I thought I would obviously look:
"Easy peasy, I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR!" I think to myself as I hoist my body up. As soon as my knees hit the pad, I started to sink down, which is normal-- I mean, you're meant to pull yourself up. But I didn't pull myself up. I couldn't pull myself up. It was at that moment that I felt all of the strength leave my arms. It was as if I was trying to raise my weight-y body from the depths of quicksand while lifting with spaghetti noodles. In other words, I wasn't budging. And then I started laughing. Like, uncontrollable laughter... while hanging there. Mr. Trainer kept telling me to "just pull yourself up" which I was unable to do because THE STRENGTH! IT WAS GONE! So as impressive as I thought that I would look, I'm sure I was much more comparable to this, only in spandex:
I think that it was somewhere in those few moments of me hanging from the machine in hysterical laughter that Billy realized what kind of project he signed up for when he took me on as a client. For what it's worth, he gets his laughs as I throw medicine balls at his head during crunches and imagine myself squashing him as I do countless walking lunges across the studio floor, so I guess we can call it even.
No comments:
Post a Comment