Exercise Fun

Ever since I can remember I ran around.  I've always been an active person who made every movement an exercise in movementism, er movementee?  Anyway, I did every sport I could all the way through school and the only one that I could never do officially was Football due to a mother's intuition/"oh my god my kid is gonna die."

The other day I talked about my conversion to Yoga and how it has really helped me work on my main weakness in regards to physicality, my flexibility.  I've always been pretty flexible since I'm a dancer and a track runner.  I used to do the hurdles, long jump, almost every sprinting event and once in a while an 800 and one time in High School I had to run the mile.  It was a "run" in technical terms only.

The idea of muscle confusion or cross training has always been something I've done even as a kid without knowing those technical terms.  I always changed up my workouts and my playtime with running, dancing, weights, throwing, chasing, ya know the basics.  As an adult in college I had four or five full hour routines that I would run through.  I worked out every day right after work and I would go through my routines of half cardio, half lifting randomly depending on what machines were available and what music was playing.

I've started doing three classes per week with two Yoga classes and one Step class.  The Step class is interesting because there is a group of regulars, who shall be henceforth referred to as "the cool kids," and they know the instructor's routine by heart.  The routine is vigorous and quite enjoyable and the cool kids have a call out and call back with the instructor.  I feel like I'm back in my church days with the pastor yelling out this and that while the crowd nodded their heads, fanned their sweating faces and blurted out "Amen," "yeah boys," "What chu talkin bout Willis's," and the ever popular "Arrrgh!."  The cool kids were shouting encouragement to the others in the room, joking with the instructor and using each other's steps in an elaborate dance of stepmania.

I loved it.  This is my third time in this class and now I understand the instructor's calls and his method, his madness and his enthusiasm.  If you have never taken Step, each instructor is different and uses different terms for similar moves.  What one instructor would call "around the world" another might call "Wadda wadda bing bang."  So it takes a bit to get used to each instructor you encounter.  The teacher at this 24 Hour Fitness likes to mess with people.  He gets close to you and makes faces if you are not smiling.  He jumps up and down flapping his arms and makes sounds somewhere between the squawk of a crow and the lowing of an oxen.  It's quite impressive actually since he is doing this while stepping to "Single Ladies" without any sense of irony.