Pep talk required
Sep. 5th, 2011 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI've had two sessions at the gym which reminded me exactly why I was scared of exercise. I'm not exactly going to give up after 9 months, but I'm feeling rubbish and I could do with some hugs / encouraging thoughts.
Now that my fitness is a bit better than utterly non-existent, I've started going a class. It's a thing called "Body Pump™"; the concept is that you do various things repetitive things with weights, set to music. Until last week, I quite enjoyed the class; it was varied, it was a mix of cardio and strength exercises, it felt challenging without being painful. Then on Thursday there was a new instructor who did things a bit differently. Not vastly different, I could tell it was the same basic concept, but there were two minor changes that made it really unpleasant and stressful for me. The first was that she wanted us to do some of the exercises really fast, two reps to a beat, that sort of thing. And the second was that she interspersed the weight exercises I'm used to, with what I think of as aerobics, without any weight, but including things like jumping.
So I re-discovered the fact that I can't do complicated sequences of movements fast. Unlike what would have happened at school, nobody laughed at me because I couldn't keep up with the class, but I still felt humiliated, perhaps because of setting off bad memories. It didn't help that I was having a bad day anyway; I'd just heard that my big grant application was summarily rejected, not even meeting the bar to be reviewed in detail. So I spent basically the whole evening with head squirrels reciting, I'm so stupid, I can't do anything, I'm rubbish; it was all I could do not to burst into tears. And then I felt even more stupid for getting upset about such a minor thing as a grant rejection (which is a normal part of my professional life) or not being able to do aerobics when I thought I was signing up for a class where strength was more important than speed.
Then I went to Cambridge at the weekend and had generally awesome time, except that I'm allergic to Cambridge and I set off a bit of asthma. I sort of knew I was wheezy this morning, and decided to ignore it because if I am determined to keep up my gym routine even when I'm feeling under the weather. If I start giving myself excuses, I'll end up "not feeling up to it" more often than not. But of course I couldn't do the cardio, and trying set off an asthma attack and it was painful and I wanted to panic (and also felt like a failure for not being able to complete my routine). I suppose one comfort is that I am now fit enough that I can tell the difference between my heart not keeping up and my lungs not keeping up. (That's not physiologically accurate, but as a shorthand.) A year ago I couldn't really do anything to raise my heartrate at all without having a very good chance of setting off asthma, so this is a definite improvement.
This is pretty much what I was scared would happen when you all encouraged me to try going to the gym anyway. So I'm hoping you'll encourage me again and reassure me that just because I've had two consecutive bad sessions, doesn't mean that I have completely lost the ability to do exercise. Sorry to be whiny; I just feel as if I've reverted back to my teenage self being constantly frustrated and picked on because I couldn't keep up with physical activity.
Now that my fitness is a bit better than utterly non-existent, I've started going a class. It's a thing called "Body Pump™"; the concept is that you do various things repetitive things with weights, set to music. Until last week, I quite enjoyed the class; it was varied, it was a mix of cardio and strength exercises, it felt challenging without being painful. Then on Thursday there was a new instructor who did things a bit differently. Not vastly different, I could tell it was the same basic concept, but there were two minor changes that made it really unpleasant and stressful for me. The first was that she wanted us to do some of the exercises really fast, two reps to a beat, that sort of thing. And the second was that she interspersed the weight exercises I'm used to, with what I think of as aerobics, without any weight, but including things like jumping.
So I re-discovered the fact that I can't do complicated sequences of movements fast. Unlike what would have happened at school, nobody laughed at me because I couldn't keep up with the class, but I still felt humiliated, perhaps because of setting off bad memories. It didn't help that I was having a bad day anyway; I'd just heard that my big grant application was summarily rejected, not even meeting the bar to be reviewed in detail. So I spent basically the whole evening with head squirrels reciting, I'm so stupid, I can't do anything, I'm rubbish; it was all I could do not to burst into tears. And then I felt even more stupid for getting upset about such a minor thing as a grant rejection (which is a normal part of my professional life) or not being able to do aerobics when I thought I was signing up for a class where strength was more important than speed.
Then I went to Cambridge at the weekend and had generally awesome time, except that I'm allergic to Cambridge and I set off a bit of asthma. I sort of knew I was wheezy this morning, and decided to ignore it because if I am determined to keep up my gym routine even when I'm feeling under the weather. If I start giving myself excuses, I'll end up "not feeling up to it" more often than not. But of course I couldn't do the cardio, and trying set off an asthma attack and it was painful and I wanted to panic (and also felt like a failure for not being able to complete my routine). I suppose one comfort is that I am now fit enough that I can tell the difference between my heart not keeping up and my lungs not keeping up. (That's not physiologically accurate, but as a shorthand.) A year ago I couldn't really do anything to raise my heartrate at all without having a very good chance of setting off asthma, so this is a definite improvement.
This is pretty much what I was scared would happen when you all encouraged me to try going to the gym anyway. So I'm hoping you'll encourage me again and reassure me that just because I've had two consecutive bad sessions, doesn't mean that I have completely lost the ability to do exercise. Sorry to be whiny; I just feel as if I've reverted back to my teenage self being constantly frustrated and picked on because I couldn't keep up with physical activity.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-07 03:19 pm (UTC)Listening to my body is always a struggle for me. I still have to remind myself that it's not just an annoying meatsack I have to drag around, and get over the intellectual snobbery of thinking that information I can obtain by pure reasoning is more valuable. Also my body is slightly broken in that it tends to send "help, not enough air!" messages long before it's necessary. But I'm definitely getting the hang of distinguishing such false alarms from stuff I actually should be paying attention to.
I think just following the exercises at half pace isn't quite the solution for me at the moment. I don't have enough coordination to be able to handle picking out the musical beat while doing things differently from the instructor and the rest of the class and trying to do exercises complicated enough to require attention. When I'm panicking anyway, I definitely don't have enough spare brain power. Right now I think a better solution is to stay away from that class when it's the instructor who wants to do complicated things fast. That's a bit harder to do without being rude, because if I turn up, get ready for class and then walk out when she appears, it's hard to do that discreetly.