A Pump class by any other name…
Ow. It’s been a while since I had a good gym rant, right? I’m in some serious pain here, people. I meant to go to Pump class last night (with the instructor that I like) but by the time I got there it was full. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just run tonight and tomorrow I’ll try out a new guy.” Bad idea. First, a little background for you non-gym-rats:

Body Pump is a class where a bunch of people do synchronized weight lifting to music. It’s pretty low-impact and it targets all the major muscle groups, so it’s a good workout for me. The thing is, it’s like franchised. The company that invented it makes gyms pay a license fee to use the name. My new gym must have had a falling out with them, because we don’t have “Pump” class anymore… We have “Flex” class. It’s the exact same workout though and that’s all that matters. I mean, the whole point of having this standardized routine is that you pretty much know the workout you’re going to get before you go, right?

Wrong. This guy tonight apparently decided to do a little innovating. My suspicions were raised when he had us each get some extra equipment (“Two extra bars??”), but everyone else in the class was either an old lady or a scrawny Asian, so I figured I’d be able to keep up. Right off the bat, he had us doing aerobics to warm up. Aerobics! I don’t have a good track record with that. Plus it was like eighty degrees in that gym. I was sweating like crazy. (It reminds me of that yoga crazy people do in a heated room.) As for the actual lifting, he went too fast and combined groups together and pushed me beyond where I could go. He had us doing weird things like using the extra bars as ski poles for doing calf raises. He made me do pushups on the floor without my towel and I got carpet burn on my knees. (Yeah, I do girly pushups. But at least I can do more now than I could six months ago!) Halfway through it I was literally trying to come up with a good enough excuse to leave. It was like yoga all over again. Every time I looked around I could see that everybody else was doing fine, while I just couldn’t get into it. I had no energy and I was flailing, and every time he’d exhort us to go a little deeper or hold something longer I could tell he was directing it right at ME. And he went so fast! I was trying so hard to keep up that I knew my form was suffering. Now I’m feeling it. My legs hurt and my neck feels seriously screwed up on one side. I’ve probably slipped a disc or something. Stupid man. I should raise a complaint or something… *grumble grumble*