Beth Skwarecki

I'm taking a statistics class. I somehow got through college without taking one, and it's about time I learned this stuff.

I'm also taking a swimming class at some ungodly hour in the morning on Fridays. I never had any trouble keeping myself afloat, but now I'm learning how to do swimming strokes properly (like how and when to breathe in freestyle). [Helpful links: how to keep water out of your nose, Retro swimsuits from the actual Esther Williams, swimming tutorial with bonus links]

Chris and I have also been taking dance classes, but there's not much to say about that; you kind of have to be there. If you want something to read about, try the catalog of swing dance styles on streetswing.com, a great time-waster where you can read about what dances influenced other dances or were combined with other dances, when and where they were invented or popularized ... Here's one place to start, just click everything.

These are the beginnings of my latest sewing project: the awesomest pair of homemade jeans ever to grace my butt. (They don't have much competition, really). The pattern is from Sew U. It's a good book that comes with a fabulous pants pattern; the only alteration I made was to make the thighs a little roomier, the better to accomodate my fat massive muscles.

A lot of people aspire to join a gym, or go to their school's gym, or acquire a gym-going habit, etc. I was once one of these people, so I fully understand the greatest obstacle: walking into the damn gym.

Here's what I wish someone had told me.

Every gym I've seen is separated into two rooms or areas, which I will call the Treadmill Room and the Weight Room.
You can see this as a division of square footage, or as a cultural study in gender roles.

The Treadmill Room is full of girls (and a few guys) on treadmills and similar equipment. There is a stretching area and a rack of small weights in one corner. The women are running on treadmills because they believe they are too fat, and they believe that burning large numbers of calories will make them skinny. The treadmills all make a big deal of telling you how many calories you are burning. The women typically read magazines, watch TV, and/or listen to music while they work, because working out in this way is pretty boring otherwise. The guys from the Weight Room avoid the Treadmill Room, because it's obviously for girls.

The Weight Room is full of guys in tank tops lifting extremely heavy weights while admiring their muscles in the mirror. Their aim is to watch themselves lift the heaviest weights possible. More about that later.

There are also some contraptions that look like machines, but contain weights. They may be in either or both rooms. They're kinda fun, but you can usually work the same muscles better in the Weight Room.

How to begin

1. Sign up for gym membership, if necessary. (Recommended: ask for a tour. Locate the Treadmill Room, Weight Room, and Locker Room.)
   
2. Pack a gym bag: your workout clothes (t-shirt, sweatpants, change of underwear), a small towel, a water bottle, a lock for your locker. Optionally, supplies for showering.
   
3. Enter gym building; perform checking-in procedures, if any.
   
4. Enter locker room. Change into workout clothes.
   
5. Step out of locker room. DO NOT PERFORM ANY STRETCHES YET.
   

(The towel I can demystify right now: you use it to keep your sweat from getting on the various machines and benches. If you leave sweat stains on something, wipe them up with your towel).

The Treadmill Room

This may be the easiest room to get used to. First, look for flyers printed in ALL CAPS telling you to SCRIBBLE YOUR NAME ON A PIECE OF PAPER BEFORE YOU USE THE TREADMILLS. There may be sign-up sheets for all of the cardio machines, or for some and not others. Or, maybe there aren't any sign-ups at all.

Cardio machines include treadmills, ellipticals, and bikes. An elliptical trainer is the bastard child of a treadmill and a bike. If treadmills hurt your knees, skip them and go for ellipticals instead. The definition of a cardio machine is anything you can stand to use for half an hour straight. Under my definition, therefore, rowing machines ("ergometers") are not cardio machines. They may count as torture devices, however.

After completing any possible scribbling, hop on a cardio machine. If there is a computer panel with lots of blinky lights, start pedaling, and then push the buttons. It's like a little video game! The little computer will tell you how many calories it thinks you've burned, how long you've been on the machine, etc. The only difference between a treadmill and a run/walk outside is that it doesn't rain on the treadmill, and the scenery is worse. Same deal for a gym bike vs. a real bike.

It's hard to get a good workout when you're not really focused on it. The problem with the treadmills and bikes is that they're boring, so you pick up a magazine or start watching the TV. Then you forget to focus on what you're doing, and you're doing more of a light jog than the fat-blasting hardcore workout you planned on. Then again, reading a magazine on the exercise bike is a better workout than sitting on your ass at home. Choose wisely.

Now that your muscles are warmed up, feel free to go to the stretching corner for a bit. The rule of stretching is easy to remember. I even wrote a little rhyming couplet about it:

Don't stretch your muscles when they're cold
Because that's stupid.

It still needs some work in the rhyming department, but you get the idea.

How do you know what stretches to do? Look at the posters on the wall, or grab one of the magazines that has a headline like "You're fat! Do our exercises!". They typically have some good stretches in them somewhere. Hold each stretch for at least 30 seconds. Yes, this is a long time.

Is the person next to you only stretching for a few seconds at a time? Laugh quietly. They're not doing themselves any good. This is a nice little bit of foreshadowing for what you'll see in...

The Weight Room

I had several misconceptions about the Weight Room during the time I observed it from afar. I believed that the weightlifters (a) knew what they were doing, and (b) would notice and/or care if I did something stupid. Neither of these is true. In fact, anytime you see mirrors in a gym, you can be sure that everybody is admiring themselves, not watching you.

And, yes, almost all of them are doing something wrong. Never, ever, ever imitate what somebody else is doing without checking it out first in a good book or a website like Stumptuous. The last time I was at the gym - Thursday - there were three guys in the weight room. One of them was grabbing the heaviest weights he could carry, getting into position to do a bicep curl, and then leaning and bending his entire body to try to lift the thing above elbow height. He had to use his other hand to help the weight up, or else I think his back would have broken in half. Another guy loaded up the hack squat machine with literally all the 45-pound plates he could find, and then proceeded to do something I wouldn't describe as a "squat" but more like a "curtsy". In fact, he may just have been thinking really hard about bending his knees. The third guy knew better than to grab huge weights and pretend to lift them; he was doing real, actual squats. However, he was doing them inside of a Smith machine, which seems like a good idea but is actually really bad for your joints.

So, yeah. Those jocks in the weight room? They're not all that.

This isn't the place to describe the basics of weightlifting, but I'll describe the equipment: dumbbells are the things in the racks, little hand-held lumps of iron that start around 10 pounds (you can find smaller ones in the Treadmill Room, sometimes coated in pink rubber) and go up to very impressive sizes (like around 100 pounds). Barbells are long bars, held with two hands, to which you can attach plates. To assemble a barbell, put the bar on a rack of some sort; put the plates on; and put a clip on each end, to hold the plates on. When you're done, take the plates off and put all the pieces away. If you don't, you're a bad person.

There may be a Smith Machine, which lets you raise and lower a built-in barbell along a fixed track. It has stops so you can say "don't let the bar go lower than this", thus averting the possibility of crushing yourself by dropping the weight. However, forcing your body to move a weight in a fixed vertical track is not always good for it. Beware.

There may be powerlifting cages, which have stops like the Smith Machine (so that you can't drop the weights too far) but there's no track - you and you alone are controlling where the weight goes. If your gym has these, use them.


Here are my rules for pumping iron:

1. Know your exercises before you get there. Read up on what you'll be doing before you leave home. Feel free to take notes, and bring them with you. In fact, serious lifters often take a notebook into the gym to write down how much they're lifting, so they can keep track of their progress.
   
2. The first time you try any exercise, or anytime you're not sure of your form, do a whole set first with no weight - holding your hands as if you had a weight in them - and then with a light weight. In the case of barbell exercises, the bar by itself might be pretty heavy. In that case, do it with a pair of light dumbbells or see if your gym has a nice heavy body bar (you may have to swipe this from the Treadmill Room).
   
3. The above is called a "warm-up set". If you skip straight from the Locker Room to the Weight Room, be sure to do warm-up sets, especially for your first few exercises.
   
4. If a weight is so heavy you can't keep good form, get a smaller weight. If no smaller weights are available, make do. Use a body bar, or a broomstick, or a pair of tiny one-pound pink dumbbells, or whatever you can find. Don't lift something big just because it's there. You'll regret it. And after you do enough sets with these light weights, you really will find it easier to move up to something heavier! In the meantime, supplement your broomstick exercises with some other motion that works the same muscles. For example, if you have trouble lifting the bar to do a bench press, work up to it by doing pushups.
   
5. Always consider: what will happen if I drop this? In the case of a bicep curl, if you drop the weights, they will fall to the floor and make a loud noise. Everyone will stop looking in the mirror and turn and stare at you. But you will still be alive! So that's OK. However, if you're doing a bench press and you drop the weight, it will CRUSH YOU. This means you need a spotter, a person who will, in such an event, help you hold the bar up so as not to die. The power cage serves a similar purpose.
   
6. Eat your damn protein, or else you'll never get any stronger.
   

If you want to learn more, start here.