It is great to have an appointment to keep with someone else. I've tried exercising with a friend from time to time but they never seemed to be able to keep up the schedule for very long. So, if I have to pay someone to keep an appointment with me so be it. But with paying I get the added benefit of learning how to exercise properly plus she monitors all those fun things like my weight, resting and peak heart rates and body fat percentage. (I didn't really want to know where I'm at right now but she told me anyway. It's not pretty.)
It's not like I've never exercised. I do things like hike, snowshoe, ride my bike, yoga, etc. but they always get boring and lonely after a while and I find it difficult to keep them up. Plus, I was just not mentally ready to make the commitment to exercise regularly for a long period of time (like my lifetime). Now I'm ready, I'm doing it. Plus I laid down a chunk of change to keep me going for four months which I predict I'll keep doing. (Time to rework that budget.)
This first week of exercising has been an interesting experience. When you hike, you notice your legs getting tired. When you garden, you notice your back and arms getting tired. Working out with a trainer I notice everything getting tired. It has really opened up my body awareness. I can feel that 6-pack buried deep under the layers my midsection. Traps, quads, hamstrings, deltoids, and many others that I am not even going to try to name (I'll leave that up to the professionals). Who knew I had those muscles? Who knew they worked, could be sore, could feel good being sore.
I have spent a large portion of my life being relatively sedentary. Not to place blame, but I can see how that can be a learned behavior. When I think back over my childhood, no one exercised for the sake of exercising. No one really did anything physical except for work, working at the nursing home, working at the hardware store, working at the farm, working in the kitchen. If there was no work, we were usually sitting around watching TV or playing cards. As society changed and I don't have to work a farm, I just continued sitting on a daily basis with a few incidents of activity thrown in. I learned to sit. I learned to conserve energy even when I didn't need to be.
Feeling my body work and do things and be strong (stronger than I thought it was) and do exercises and hear "you can do it, Cari" or "only one more" or "that seemed easy, let's increase your weight next time" has been an amazing and eye-opening experience. My trainer asked me this morning what my favorite exercise was so far. The question caught me off guard. I didn't have an answer quickly. I thought about it for several minutes first wondering why I couldn't pinpoint one exercise that I like more than the others and second just feeling my body and trying to feel which muscles were happiest to be moving and working. Then the answer came to me.
"All of them," I said. "I have really enjoyed getting to feel my body work, getting to feel actual individual muscles move. Having spent most of my life sitting and never really having the opportunity to exercise properly, it is just amazing to experience all of the exercises and be doing something with my body."
"Ah, squats," she said. "Squats are your favorite."
