An Exercise In Artificial Excitement

Okay, Sarah has really waited for this one.

Finally, finally, I am back on a regular workout routine, which has stabilized my mood and taken a few pounds off and all kinds of good things. I have a pretty decent daily schedule set up, which I’ve been pretty good about sticking to, except when it’s disrupted by weird little things.

One of my staples is the new set of The Firm workouts, which no longer require that you have a big plastic step in your living room, which makes them much more apartment-friendly and also keeps me from having to throw things at the television when they keep making me step up to the high step.

This one includes “Hi-Def Sculpt” (with Annie!), “Cardio Overdrive” (with Alison!), “Hard-Core Fusion” (with Allie!), and “Cardio Party” (with all of them, plus Rebecca!). The one that Sarah and I have spent the most time talking about — even though she was flatly refusing to do it last time we talked — is “Cardio Party.”

IT IS NOT A PARTY, you morons. If I wanted to go to a party, I would know how to do that. It would not involve Allie Del Rio announcing that she is beginning the “fiesta,” and it certainly would not involve Rebecca at all, for any reason. I fully understand that everyone likes different instructors, and I’m not really mad at Rebecca, but…she drives me crazy, you guys.

For one thing, Rebecca has a hard time figuring out the timing to take you from one move to the next. She frequently says “do whatever” at a moment when it’s impossible to tell whether she means THIS time or NEXT time, and it isn’t consistent from one time to the next. Furthermore, there is this part where…man alive. There is this part where Rebecca keeps saying “step touch…both arms,” and she does it about a hundred times in a row, and she sounds precisely the same every single time: “Step touuuuch…both aaaaarms,” and it sounds like she’s a robot, seriously.

Annie has a different problem. Annie stops smiling, and then someone off-camera tells her to smile, and it’s way too obvious, because she goes, “DING!” all of a sudden. She’s working out perfectly normally, and then she suddely flashes this completely random toothy grin.

Among other things, these workouts make an interesting contrast with Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser fame, whom I have also grown to like even though I don’t watch that show. There’s something about the way she announces that taking the stairs is bad advice compared to doing jumping jacks that I just really like. “There is no modification for jumping jacks; I have 400-pound people who can do jumping jacks.” I like her, and I like the fact that she spends workout time making you want to die of sweat, instead of doing what some of the Firm videos fall into, which is making it too complicated so you spend half the time just trying not to step on your own feet. Alison’s “Cardio Overdrive” is like this; it keeps making you change feet needlessly, alternating sides by inserting one-beat pauses instead of just doing, like, eight on one foot and then eight on the other. Constantly changing the lead foot is actually sort of hard, and it distracts me.

There’s no getting distracted with Jillian. It’s like, “Hi, do this until you pass out.” I also really, really like her patter. It’s very encouraging, but it’s not demeaning or insulting. It sort of says, “The only way the body changes is by being placed under stress, so that’s why you’re doing this thing that feels really unpleasant.” It’s not like this is news, but the way she puts it really works on me. I have her “30-Day Shred,” and I can juuuust barely get through the first level (it’s not even a half-hour long, really) with a few little stops in the middle to catch my breath. It’s very, very challenging, but it’s also pleasantly mindless., because it only changes once every 30 seconds to a minute, and it changes between easy, obvious things.

I also took a tip from the Tomato Nation commenters and tried Inhale, the yoga show on Oxygen with Steve Ross. When Virginia Heffernan reviewed him at Slate, she made him sound kind of mean and negative, but I don’t find him that way at all. I think he’s almost always kidding, and I find the fact that he actually has a sense of humor to be refreshing. I mean, I can’t imagine a yoga class that wouldn’t be somewhat annoying at some level, because IT’S YOGA, and Steve can certainly get pretty goofy going on about your center and accessing magic by touching your belly button and so forth. But for the most part, I find him amusing.

But when Heffernan talks about the balancing poses that she finds are “difficult,” she’s singing my song. I can’t do that stuff at all, and I doubt I could with a year of practice. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never done it, but if you come equipped with some soft squishy spots on your body that Steve doesn’t have, some of his poses simply aren’t going to work for you, and the balancing stuff is among the hardest, I think.

Still, I do find it kind of interesting and invigorating, and I’m happy to have something else to fit into the routine. Right now, I’m not feeling an overwhelming need to join a gym, which is nice. I figure that if I can be as artificially happy as Annie and as mellow as Steve, but also as plain-spoken as Jillian, I will do fine.