BlogHer - 2008 Good Health-a-thon: Week #1 - BALLS OF DEATH - Comments

Too Funny.

CindyPTN — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:41:21 -0600

Thanks for the great laugh. So you don't recommend training that way?

See!?!

KristySF — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:41:43 -0600

This is why I don't spin! (Your story made me LOL for real.)

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Kristy Sammis
BlogHer's Conference & Event Planner
e. kristy@blogher.org

Spin this !

hundadaweigouren — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:02:27 -0600

Kristy that story was hysterical! I enjoyed the drawings most!

I made it to pilates three days this week and the gym for cardio three times... one of which was a spinning class.. HAs anyone ever done one of these?
I have taken a few before with an instructor I really liked.
This week was NOT one of those!
My biggest mistake was entering the room. There was only one bike left open and the rest were filled with very fit men. The instructor wore nothing but a bra (to hold in her rock hard c cups) and bike shorts. She faced us and pressed play on the music and began the next 45 minutes of Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" alternating with an annoying techno version of "Clementine". Throughout the session (every ten seconds) she yelled "Push it". It was precisely this maneuver that ended the class for me.... While the men were ignoring the instructor's advice and taking a nice Sunday ride while watching her bounce up and down doing "jumps" I was working my very large behind off and trying to keep up with this bra-clad biking maniac. Right after her 100th "push it" my bike pedal flew off ... the other pedal wacked the back of my other leg as I toppled to the base of the bike. I was beyond humiliated! I drew the eyes of all the men away from the c's, and the instructor (while still pedalling) said "oh yeah that bike is broken PUSH IT!"

I think I'll stick to the treadmill this week....

Good luck everyone!

Donna

SocalMom — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:39:12 -0600

OMG, Kristy, this is SO funny! Thank you for posting this and kicking off the good health-a-thon with laughter!

seriously, ROFLMAO

Lyssann — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:12:05 -0600

This was so funny I'm afraid I'm going to get fired for laughing too hard at work. I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like this from time to time. I hope you find a new, better trainer.

Healthy Manifest

I LOVED my personal trainer(s)!

holly_jahangiri — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:43:57 -0600

Maybe I'm weird, though, because your "hang-upside-down-till-you-fall-over-and-hit-your-head-and-die machine" was my favorite. (Kind of like doing swans on the uneven bars when I was twelve, only without the need for spotters and no chance of actually falling off and, well, dying.) My least favorite? Shoulder press. Holy mother of pearl. 10 lbs. on that stupid machine would make me pass out. I can leg press 110 lbs., no prob. Shoulder press? "Why is the room going black?" Never did figure that one out.

One of my goals this year is to be able to do ONE proper push-up. Not "girl's style," though at the moment, even that is out of reach. I WILL do a push-up in 2008 (and mind you, this will be a first - I couldn't do one even when I was a kid and reasonably fit).

Your trainer was an idiot. Sounds like he was reading straight out of a textbook - and a bad one, at that! Yikes. Makes me appreciate mine all the more. Mine started off by saying, "You like me now, but in a few weeks, you're going to HATE me. You're going to love the results, though." He was right. I lost 43 lbs. and three clothing sizes. (Of course, YOU have to do all the work; he's just a coach. Some of us are self-motivated, some of us need coaches, and...some of us need drill sergeants. Guess where I fall on the line?)

---------------
Holly Jahangiri
http://jahangiri.us/blog

You are my new hero

dawn224 — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:29:07 -0600

No really, you are. This is totally me (except my boobs are bigger than my head, rather than being the same size). It's a skill to write about fitness and make it funny. Well done.

I hope those drinks tasted fantastic.

On the subject of personal trainers...

sassymonkey — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:26:39 -0600

A friend of mine told me yesterday that she hired one. And one the trainer to yell at her and call her horrible names because "she needed to hear it". My comment: The things we pay people to do/say to us in nuts.

Someday I'll join a gym again...maybe.

Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.

2008 Good Health-a-thon: Week #1 - BALLS OF DEATH

KristySF — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:20:30 -0600

Update (now with drawings!)

Last week we launched BlogHer's 2008 Good Health-a-thon, which is all about getting healthy in the new year. Now, the very sound, very inspiring premise of the 'thon is that there are lots of ways we can focus on getting healthy in the new year that don't revolve around weight loss. Indeed, there are plenty of ways to measure "health" that don't require a bathroom scale.

(This is especially helpful if you ah, happened to throw your scale out of the bathroom one day in a hysterical fit inspired by oh, I dunno...let's say a grapefruit diet gone awry.)

(Stupid grapefruit.)

So anyway, yay! Good health! No scales!

Well, except.

It turns out that my own very personal goals actually do involve weight loss, and (more specifically) getting into better physical shape. And so I thought a good first step would be to hire myself a personal trainer.

Or, more accurately, I decided that I wasn't throwing nearly enough money at my weight-loss efforts.

Sure, I thought, I am donating huge sums of money to my gym every month, but what I want to know is: how can I spend even MORE money to get exactly NO results? Surely there must be a way to keep my ass and boobs inflating at a frightening rate!

And then it occurred to me.

I KNOW! I did not exclaim, because I was totally doing this at work and people would have stared at me. I could hire a personal trainer!

And lo, one of the most disastrous work-outs of my life ensued. (And this is really saying something. See historic reference.)

To put this in perspective, you need to understand that I am a single, thirtysomething chick who is cute but also overweight because shutup. That is not the point. The point IS, by this phase in my life, I know a thing or two about diet and exercise.

(Note: KNOWING them does not mean I APPLY them, but if I applied them I wouldn't be writing this, and you would totally be missing out.)

Anyway.

I decided to troll Craigslist to find myself a trainer. And if you have ever scoured Craigslist looking for a nice, normal person, you know perfectly well that I was setting myself up for failure from the beginning.

My criteria were that the trainer needed to be at least somewhat affordable, somewhat local, and somewhat...how do you say?...articulate. (Hey, I do not need my trainer to be a literary marvel; I simply want my trainer to use things like both nouns and verbs, which was surprisingly hard to find. Well, especially because I also sought the occasional punctuation mark. Example of non-effective advertising: "I will u in ur home or office make u hotter then u ever been b4!")

So after wading through the ninetyhundred ULTIMATE POWER DIESEL EXTREME ROCKHARD KICKASS FEEL THE BURN WORKOUT OF UR LIFE EXPERIENCE ads, I found a guy who was all like, "Hey, I can help you." So I contacted him.

We spoke.

He was nice.

We agreed to meet for a "consultation."

Let me just say right here that the "consultation" was fantastic. The trainer was cute and sweet and seemed all genuinely concerned about me and my goals and my out-of-shapeness. He seemed to want the same things for me that I wanted. And when we got to the stickier subjects, the ones I was afraid would be nightmarish, he eased my fears completely.

"So, uh, do I have to like, weigh in?" I asked, resigned.

"Oh, no! We don't do weigh-ins! Or fat calculations! Or BMI measurements! Most of those metrics are arbitrary!" he replied.

(He didn't actually say those all in exclamations, but for how good it sounded, he may as well have. I all but swooned.)

And then he went in for the kill --
"The best judge of progress is how you feel in your clothes. You'll know how you're coming along."

WOW! HOW FANASTIC! I was totally sold. And then I asked the next question, just to be sure I wasn't dreaming.

"What about diet and nutrition?"

"Let's not worry about that just yet," he said. "What's most important right now is that we get you more active and feeling better," he said.

Uh huh. So I went back the next night for our first session.

It happened in two parts.

PART ONE: THE NUTRITION DISCUSSION

Remember how just like, three lines ago my sweet trainer was all, let's not worry about diet? Yeah. So imagine my surprise when the first thing he said was "Here, have a seat. LET'S DISCUSS DIET."

"Uh...okay...?"

And then he did this thing that was straight out of a textbook. Or Kindergarten. He basically asked me to name fruits and vegetables. (I am not kidding.) He wrote them down.

APPLE! He wrote it down.

GRAPEFRUIT! He wrote it down.

Then he asked me to name lean meats, and wrote those down, too. Then we discussed skim dairy and additional lean proteins such as legumes. When we got to grains, he got a very concerned look on his face. "We try and stay away from starches and carbs as much as possible. The occasional whole grain is okay sometimes." Then he added the words "SOME whole grains" to the piece of paper.

Then, handing the paper to me, he said, completely seriously, "So if you just stick to eating only what's on here, you will be fine."

Um.

I must have stared at him blankly. Perhaps sensing my lack of shared enthusiasm, he then pointed to the column with fruits and veggies and said, "But you can eat as MUCH of these as you want! YOU COULD EAT BROCCOLI ALL DAY LONG!!!"

I did not laugh in his face, although I wanted to. Because really? OH IS THAT ALL? JUST EAT ONLY HEALTHY FOODS??? OH GLORY DAY!!!

I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I notice that 'wine' is not a food group."

He did not seem to think this was funny, although maybe he was laughing on the inside. I certainly was. Instead, he explained to me that while a glass of wine is probably okay sometimes, alcohol is not really a standard part of a healthy living plan.

"You should probably just not drink," I believe he said.

Uh huh. So apparently, if I eat only super healthy foods, stop drinking, and work out regularly, I will probably get healthy.

How enlightening.

So armed with this new, earth-shattering information, we headed to the workout.

PART TWO: THE WORK-OUT

We immediately started by walking over to the part of the gym where they have the balls.

You know those balls.

The ones that are always pictured with women who are light and bendy and inordinately happy to be rolling around the floor on a BALL defying gravity and building muscles or some shit like that.

But see, I am not built like super gymnast lady above. I am with the cushy, top-heavy/bottom-heavy-ness. I have to take things like GRAVITY into account. In fact, I have stayed away from the balls up until now for this very reason.

So when the trainer was like, "OKAY! Let's get on the ball!" I just stared at him, thinking, um, I cannot get on the ball.

So I said, "I cannot get on the ball."

"But the ball is so good for your CORE."

And immediately I thought that I do not care if the ball can give me a total body workout or build my CORE because for all the amazing research that the world has done lately about building one's CORE for long-term wellness, my more immediate concern is still NOT ROLLING FACE FIRST ONTO THE FLOOR.

And, given my familiarity with things like the size of my butt, the size of the ball, and PHYSICS, I was confused.

My trainer did not understand my apprehension. (My trainer has also never had boobs the size of bowling balls, either, so there you go.) But I? I could see the whole thing happen in my head.

But. He was my trainer. And he was insistent. So after a great face-off (a la "I can't" "You can." Repeat.) I gave in. I got on the damn ball.

I did not fall over. At first.

Actually, I did okay, because I even managed to get myself into the horrid, horrid position called "bridging" where your back is on the ball and your feet are out in front, supporting your trunk, and that is when I realized that getting my ass on the ball was the least of my troubles. Once in a "bridge," I was sure I was going to die. Either my legs would give out or my ass would or I'd forget to balance and roll right off (see above).

Yet unfortunately nothing gave way quick enough, so the trainer made me start doing crunches.

Invisible Internet friends reading this, I do not know how many crunches I did, but it was at least thirty thousand. Maybe two million. With a couple breaks between sets. He -- that wretched man -- just kept saying, okay, do more.

Unhg.

And then, when we finally, FINALLY ended that torture, he said, "Let's try this machine now."

Which is when I discovered a few key things.

1. I hated my trainer.

2. I would do anything to stop crunching on the ball, even if it involved some as-yet unseen machine.

3. I was stuck.

Yeah. See, while HE had already leapt over to the next torture device, I had not yet managed to get up. Because I couldn't. I was so unsure of myself and so scared of GRAVITY and my abs were so sore that I literally could not move.

"How do you get up?" I asked, from my prone position.

"What do you mean?" my stupid trainer asked.

"I can't get up," I offered.

"What do you mean?" he asked again.

"I don't know how to get off the ball," I answered, trying not to sound panicky while I watched my life flashing before my eyes, picturing myself suffering death-by-CORE-ball-inertia, promising myself that if I ever managed to somehow get upright again, I would celebrate with a glass of wine or 12. And no broccoli.

Eventually the trainer figured out that I could not get myself off the ball without help, so he hoisted me back onto my feet. And rather than check in with me about my near-death CORE ball experience, he bounded over to the next machine and demonstrated the most awful exercise I have ever seen in my entire life. Worse than the CORE ball of death.

He climbed into this...this...torture chamber, I guess, resting his torso against a padded bar, and then folded himself over it.

Shwoop!

Then he used his CORE strength to pull himself right back up again.

Shwoop!

And then looked at me and said the most ridiculous words that have ever been said to me in my whole entire 32 years of being alive (and trust me, there have been many).

He said: Now you do it.

Now I do it?

NOW I DO IT??? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. SURELY YOU JEST!

But he wasn't jesting. Mr. YouCanHaveAllTheBroccoliYouWant, WhatDoYouMeanYouCan'tGetOffTheBall seemed to have zero idea of my physical and mental limitations. I was scared of a BALL. Was I really going to climb into a hang-upside-down-till-you-fall-over-and-hit-your-head-and-die machine? REALLY???

So I said, "REALLY?"

"Yeah," he said. "Just try it."

And then he said the next most ridiculous thing that has ever been uttered to me.

He said:
"YOU MIGHT LIKE IT."

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

But convinced of his powers of persuasion, he jumped back in the machine to demonstrate just how EASY it was. Erm, sort of like so:

Uh huh. Just down and up. Down and up.

Except he forgot the other, SECRET step that I knew awaited me, wherein my neck would snap in two as my entire body, propelled downward by my massive rack's gravitational pull, would collapse on top of it.

But.

Because I am stupid, or more likely because I was delirious from the first set of 50 billion crunches on the damn ball, I climbed in. I gave it a go.

And you know? I didn't topple over. Wonders never cease.

Yet instead of my trainer praising God that I did not hurtle off the machine to my neck-snapping doom, he simply had me go another 104 trillion sets or so, going down and up like normal, and then down and up from my left side and then my right. Like it was a perfectly normal thing for me to be doing.

Well, until I couldn't get up again.

Yes. I got stuck. Again.

There I was. Just me and my boobs, hanging sideways off the Godforsaken Fall-Over Machine with my entire CORE having given up the fight. My core was done. Gravity won.

"I need to stop now," I told my trainer. And I think when he realized that I literally could not move from the bent-over position, he finally, finally understood. He helped me out of the death contraption and once again, I was grateful to be upright.

"So that's about it!" he said, our hour completed. "When would you like to come back and do this again?" he asked, I think in earnest.

I told him I'd have to get back to him.

I left.

And I did not return.

But I did stop at the liquor store on my walk home.

And thus concludes the first week of the Good Health-a-thon. I hope you're having a better time of it than I am.

Click here for Update II: Bagels of Death.

When she is not busy failing at various weight-loss attempts, Kristy is busy working as BlogHer's Conference & Events Manager, which she insists she's much better at. She blogs at She Just Walks Around With It."