Thursday, February 2, 2012

Muh Fitness

I like working out. At least, that's what I tell myself. I've had three kids and I'm aware that the metabolic brick wall I'll be slamming into at full speed is lurking at the bottom of a container of Trader Joe's hummus. I go through a ton of hummus, so I'm expecting this any day now.

I'm a fan of the Les Mills workouts. I got into it when my friend, who is a Les Mills trainer, promised if I came to one of her classes she'd make sure I probably wouldn't die. Since I was a few weeks into recovering from childbirth, I probably should have been doing water aerobics with the 70 year old cardiac patients at the YMCA, but I didn't die. she's always been pretty solid when it comes to standing by stuff like that.

When we moved to CA and got settled I started looking for a gym that offered these classes. I found one, attended a couple of classes, wrote a Yelp.com review about how awful the experience was and simultaneously started an internet war with a women-only gym and became a hero for everyone who hated this particular gym and trainer. I'm still getting emails from people who are pumped about my review. The angry letters from the gym owner have tapered off, but they won't stop sending me their stupid weekly newsletter. I applaud their passive-aggression, actually. Well played.

Anyway, I tried a couple other gyms but missed the benefits from my regular workout. Then I discovered Les Mills was releasing a workout, equipment included, that you can do at home. No paying the gym babysitter to watch Lennox? No creepy interactions with meat heads at the gym? No more internet wars? I will take it, and express mail that sucker.


My husband is a little gun-shy about purchases related to fitness. Before we met, he invested a small fortune on shakes/videos/ipod shoes/gym memberships/yoga pants/etc. for people that used them enthusiastically once, maybe twice. It's kind of a trigger for him when a commercial comes on for the next "Get Thin, Fast!" product and leaves him shaking his head and muttering under his breath like and angry old man. While this has provided me with immense entertainment, I knew talking to him about wanting to order the Les Mills stuff would be tricky.

Naturally, I waited until we were at an expensive anniversary dinner to bring it up because it's hard to get away with muttering and ranting in a nice restaurant. I casually took a sip of water and told him I was thinking about ordering this program since there is probably a bounty on my head put out there by angry fitness instructors at the all-women gym.

He did pretty well. He blinked a lot and did that weird neck cracking thing and said "That sounds great, because you'll actually use it!" which I know was actually him trying to convince himself that I would actually use it. Not him paying me some kind of compliment for being industrious with my fitness routine.

So since I actually may have placed the order before talking to him, it arrived quickly. (I stumbled over it that night when we came home) I'm rolling with the idea that the fulfillment center is actually our neighbor's garage. Rolling by myself.

After the first two days I was really mad at myself for not asking for the same guarantee that my fitness instructor friend gave me about how I probably wouldn't die while working out. I was laying on the family room floor after the people on the DVD finally stopped clapping for me, wondering how long it would take someone to find me after I failed to pick Ben up from work and Lennox had awoke from his nap and dropped every battery-operated device we own in the toilet. Then I looked at the open workout guide on the floor and realized I had been doing the workout recommendation for week SIX of the program. Not week ONE.

I have no idea how I've almost made it to 30   25.

Ben made a comment the other day about how toned I'm starting to look. When I informed him that it's because I've been obeying the chipper slave drivers that mask their evilness with a cute Australian accent, I think I watched him respond to internal stimuli which came in the form of angels singing gloriously from the heavens, in his head.

"You've actually been doing the workouts this entire time?"

And then he smiled a little and could tell that the healing process has started and I can probably squeeze an elliptical machine out of him if I keep devoting Lennox's nap time to pure torture instead of my usual routine of folding laundry and seeing how much hummus I can heap on to one pretzel chip in one shot while watching Hulu.

Les Mills is magic.





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