My Journey With Health And Fitness – A Whole New Experience
Happy Halloween everyone! We have been changing out our Offrenda (altar for the Day of the Dead) every day recognizing different people. Today we added our parents as well as my maternal grandparents. The display is bright and colourful and has most of the required elements. We started this tradition 2 years ago and made the altar all about my little brother whom we had lost a few months earlier. At the time my sister and I found it very cathartic as it was pretty much every day that we added something he loved. This year we even recognized the day for lost mascotas (pets) by putting up their pictures. This altar seems to grow every year.
I decided I was going to go back to attending a workout on Saturday mornings. For a while it had been more of a strength/weightifting class which I had tried previously but is just not my thing. When I was booking classes last weekend I noticed the Saturday was back to a regular bootcamp style class and it noted one of my usual instructors would be leading the class so I signed up. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and found out it was a different instructor but what the hell, I was game to give it a try.
Now every time I have someone new I have to go through all my issues with them. For example, I can’t kneel, my right knee has limited flexion, if the tendonosis in my ankle is flaring up then no high impact moves. I went through that with her and she took me to the white board to go through each exercise to see if I needed any modifications. I felt I could do all but one of them and we discussed an alternative. I was good to go.
When looking at that white board I realized this was going to be quite a different workout than what I have done before. Not the exercises themselves but how the class was all laid out. You still did sets of exercises but in between was a pretty intense cardio workout that you repeated several times. I thought hmm, I’m kinda looking forward to trying this. At the end, even though she made me do a total of 42 push ups, I was pretty happy with the workout.
But something else happened. Apparently as of last night there were 7 participants signed up for the class. By time we started there was just me (the usual rule is there needs to be at least 2 participants but the last one was a no show). The instructor decided that she would give me a personal training session and she would do the workout along with me. What an amazing experience! When you are the only one in the class it gives the instructor the opportunity to really get into the minutia of the movements. She was able to take more time to explain the muscles I should be targeting and why they are important. She didn’t push me but I felt I needed to demonstrate to her how I could keep up with her (yes, she is several decades younger than me). We ended up finishing early because it was just me so she did an awesome set of glutes/abs. Let me assure you by time I finish going up and down our stairs 20-30 times tonight handing out candy my glutes will be on fire.
This was all a whole new experience for me and I loved it. Getting that kind of personal attention was amazing. I am so going back again next Saturday though hope more participants show up. If not I am really good at having the same attention as today.
