I've been thinking about the gym days of yore, before I became pregnant with our first son, and my man and I were at university together. We both needed a few hours to keep our full-time status and decided that taking a weight training class would be a fun way to spend more time together and loose some excess baggage. (I used to consider tipping the scales at 128 to be fluffy. How sweet and naive I was.) So we signed up for this class, and my husband decides it would be great to put me through his old football training program from high school. (That was when high school football teams knew where the weight rooms were.) The first day we had class in the gym he says "we need to see what your maximum weight is so I can set your percentages for the next few weeks." Okay sure, no problem.
So we go over to the squat rack and I do a few reps working my way up to a respectable max. Legs are no problem for me. I'm built like a brood mare, so I have pretty good strength in my lower half. The only trouble there is finding pants to fit once my quads pop out. I max out at about 80 pounds. Now I'm feeling pretty good about myself because all the skinny little college boys are staring because they've never seen a girl at the squat station. They're really impressed...then I go over to the bench press.
My husband gets me in position and explains proper form, then walks around behind me to spot. I look up at the bar and say "aren't you going to put any weights on it?" After all, I just did 80 lbs over on the squat rack, it's not like I'm a wimp or something. He just looked at me. "I think you should try the bar first." Then he smiles that smile. The knowing smile. The infuriating smile. Oh, yeah? I'll just show you.
The first time I tried to lift the bar it popped up off the rack about 2 centimeters. Then it slammed back down. Loudly. Then I tried again. My right arm managed to get its side up two inches, but the left stayed glued to the rack no matter how I turned or twisted or flailed my legs. This is so sad! Surely I can get one rep on the bar. It's humiliating!
"Keep your feet on the floor." he says. And smiles again.
Right! One rep you smug little monkey. Failure is not an option. I sucked in a deep breath, grabbed the bar, yelled like a charging samurai warrior "Huuuh hoooeeeuuhyaaaaaah!!!" and did one rep. Arms jiggling and flapping like flags in a storm. Face like a WWF wrestler.
Now everyone was staring again. In a very different way.
"Maybe we should try dumbbells for you."
Thank you. My shame is now complete.
I want everyone here to know that I did manage to bench press my body weight by the end of that semester because my man knows what he is doing. But he laughed a lot before that happened.
I really do love working out with my man, really. Even when he smiles that infuriating smile of his. But now that we have children that almost never happens. I don't do bench press when I go by myself, because I have this threshold of shame that I try not to reach. My workouts now almost always consist of 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and 15 minutes of pieced together yoga that I retained from my days of living near a YMCA.
One thing I miss about doing yoga in a class setting is the motivating shame that comes from watching octogenarians holding flawless plow poses while I pretend that my stomach isn't strangling me. It's amazing how much more you can do when people are watching you. If I do a tape at home, no one will know if I skip all the ab exercises, or that I didn't suck in through my core like a straw when I did leg lifts. Except my dog, who will only think it is pack time on the floor and try to lay on me. There is, at home, also the element of hairy floor to be considered. I really prefer not to deal with hair in my mouth while I'm stretching. There is no vacuum known to man that can prevent this. I've looked.
However, for all the advantages of communal conditioning, there are a few things that make my dog seem like an ideal workout partner. Laying down on a bench and finding that the person before me didn't believe in towels and had abnormally expressive sweat glands. Going into a down dog and noticing that the empty skin I have leftover from bearing children has escaped my shirt and is dangerously close to dragging the mat. That no matter how hard I try not to, my hips will still occasionally hit the sides of the elliptical machine. And then there's the man on the machine next to me, making noises not normally associated with that kind of exercise, and whose earphones are turned up enough that I can hear the theme song to Chariot's of Fire.
