Showing posts with label fitness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fitness. Show all posts

Friday, January 25, 2008

After Conan Comes Mr T

"Work that butt, fool!"

After having King Conan as a trainer at the gym, I now have Mr T. Jan appears to have gone back to the Czech Republic, so they came up with Neves as a replacement. He's a short black cuboid of muscle with a stutter and he's caused me a world of pain over the last week or so.

He basically decided that Jan was 'going too easy' on me and that I needed a more rigorous, challenging programme. As he showed me through my new circuit of the gym I began to realise that the man was a vicious sadist and I was politely submitting myself to a self-imposed cycle of torture. It's strange how, as a man, one goes along with the alpha personal training male while inwardly thinking 'you're deranged if you think I can do this and a number of your jokes are highly inappropriate but I'll smile sheepishly anyway'.

I'm now expected to go round practically every machine in the gym. The worst machine is the one that exercises your arse. You have to lay on your stomach and push your leg outwards and upwards like a stroke victim going for a swim on dry land. This exercise is necessary, according to Neves, so I can 'have a butt that your wife is going to love'.

Anyway, the next time I went to the gym, I thought that maybe I'm being too negative and Neves has the measure of my capabilities. I did everything in my new programme. Afterwards I could barely move my mouse across the mouse mat and I ached for 3 days like I'd been cage-fighting with Jabba the Hutt.

It's enough to make me nostalgic about Jan!

Monday, November 19, 2007

My Gym Induction with Conan the King

As some longstanding readers will know, every now and again I engage in a futile attempt to get fit. More specifically, I join a gym in an attempt to lose weight; diligently go for a few weeks; then cease to go as my willpower ebbs away like the tide on Morecombe Bay, exposing the mudflats of my laziness.

The other key element of this process is the slightly humiliating gym induction, where a hugely fit bull-male condescendingly takes me through the necessary steps to approximate some form of fitness.

Now the cycle is starting again: I’ve joined a gym near work and have started my induction process, guided back to fitness by a taciturn man-mountain of non-specific Northern/Eastern European origin named Jan (or “Yaaan” as he pronounces it). Having an induction with Yaaan is a slightly disconcerting experience. For one thing, his arms are wider than my thighs. I can’t imagine he can use a urinal, as his arms are so muscle-bound that they surely couldn’t reach round to hold his winkle. Secondly, he delivers assessments of one’s health in terse, sinister statements:

“You haf waist of vun metre. This…not good.”

“Your BMI 16%. This…not good.”

“Your flexibility is 12cm. This also…not good.”

“Your grip…adequate. This OK.”

So I’m feeling pretty crap about myself. Then he finds out I work in advertising and launches into a condemnation of my profession.

“Advertising verrr bad as teach child to vant more consume.”

I remark that I’m fully aware that capitalism isn’t a great way to run the world, but no competing system appears to be emerging and until then I have to feed and house my children somehow. Yaaan nods sagely, a bit like Conan the King on his throne agreeing to the counsel of a lowly underling. Then we’re onto the results: I have to lose 10 kilos, but Yaaan “vill help ju do zis.”

I find out just how tomorrow – I imagine it will hurt.