Fitness Class—and Feeling Good

More than exercise

Photo by Ambitious Studio* | Rick Barrett on Unsplash

A few months ago I started attending a morning fitness class two or three times a week. It’s in a small gym, a small group of people, mostly other women.

Workouts focus on what’s called functional movement, meaning that they incorporate exercises geared toward helping a person get through the usual challenges of daily life with minimal incident.

For example, there’s one exercise involving a kettlebell, a squat, a bicep curl, and something called “halo flow.” I am not going to describe each moving piece.

I will say only that conditioning with it comes in handy when you do something such as, say, miss the last step on your way down the stairs from the second floor to the first floor, or you start to tilt backwards as you bring up a basket of laundry from the basement. Getting through all this squatting, curling, and “flow”ing business with the kettlebell ups your chances of making it to another day.

I also appreciate exercises that help me put on my socks and shoes while standing up unassisted without starting to lean to one side and then hop, hop, hopping, and crashing into the wall. I should have enough sense to sit down in the first place to put on my socks and shoes. But I don’t.

As I mentioned, class is small, anywhere from just one person to six or seven. If I attend the first class of the morning, I am usually in the middle of the pack age-wise. If I attend the second class of the morning, I am usually the youngest, even though I am now closing in on sixty. The oldest? She is eighty-three. I will circle back to her in a moment.

The two classes occur successively so that those finishing the first class usually pass by those coming in for the second class, and we often exchange intel with each other about the workout. “How was it?” Donna might ask me. “It’s hard,” I say. “You won’t be able to talk.”

Now and then we can get kind of chatty—enjoying a lot of banter about the latest flash sale, or where to buy an affordable cup of coffee, or what’s happened on the latest episode of “Bad Girls.” Sometimes we may need to have our attention recaptured. Other times, however, we’ve stayed focused and the workout has left us too winded to wonder what’s for lunch.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Fitness class has also helped me revise my notions of, well, fitness. A few weeks ago I went to a class attended by a woman named Cindy. Cindy does not look especially athletic. She is shorter than I, and probably older by about ten years, and she wears makeup and jewelry to class. She also wears weightlifting gloves. That should have been a big clue for me but I overlooked it. I so underestimated her.

For part of the workout, we had to do either jumping-jacks or jump-ropes. I am not a fan of jumping rope so I opted for jumping jacks. We had to do 500 of whichever exercise we chose. Yes, that is a big number, and, yes, it took me a long time, jumping all those jacks.

But Cindy? Somewhere just after I broke a 100 jumping jacks, thinking the whole time, God my knees hurt when will this be over?! I hear a whip-cracking sound coming from the other side of the room.

I glance over to see Cindy lashing the floor with a jump rope so fast it blurs. Whout! Whout! Whout! She was finished with her set of 500 before I even neared 200 of my jumping jacks. In addition to being a demon jump-roper, Cindy is a top-tier dead-lifter.

Marty is the 83-year-old. She brings to class a creaky, quiet determination. While Donna and I may be stalled out after a series of slam balls or Cindy is setting the air on fire with her jump-roping, Marty is methodically executing every exercise in the lineup, working her way through each set like a laboratory technician.

When Marty turned 80 she got her first tattoo. It’s an owl. I might get another one when I turn 90, she said the other day. Cool. I can’t say that tattoos are for me —the questions of what and where bedevil me. But I can say that her looking forward to something when she becomes a nonagenerian inspires me.

When you read this piece’s opening sentence, you may have thought, Fitness class? Life is hard enough. Why make it harder with exercise?

It’s true that some days I am not in the mood for class. Not every day is a winner from the start. When I wake up, I may be feeling peevish, small-minded, short-tempered. The last thing I want to do is three sets of Turkish get-ups — even more complicated than halo flows — or hear that such-and-such restaurant has the best Hamachi crudo.

But I get out and go to class anyway because I know that when I see Donna smile even though she can’t breath, or Cindy crush it on the bench press, or Marty tick off another round of windshield wipers, I will get over myself and get on with the day in much better shape than when I came in. It’s worth it, every time.

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