No pain, no gain
Is it vanity or masochism, wonders
Karin Brynard, that drives one back to the sweaty trenches in the gym every new year?
My poor old Mum would have keeled right over if she could see me now – on my back in a room full of people, legs up and knees spread wide. How unbecoming, she’d say. How unladylike and uncouth, lying there like a floozy with your ‘fannygaloo’ pointing at the ceiling. You look like an upturned frog, a spatchcocked roast chicken. Worst of all, you’re paying for it.
“Wider-wider-wider!” the trainer yells. “Stretch! Spread the knees! More. Feel the burn! Adductors must work!”
Adductors-adschmuctors. I’m not even sure I have those and, if I did, where on my body you’d find them. Because my everything is burning.
It’s my first day in an exercise class and I curse it. I signed up in a fit of New Year determination to shed the stuffed python that had settled in around my waist over Christmas. And this class, everyone swore, was the real deal. The trainer is the very best – degrees and certificates galore. She’d transform any blubbery old nag into a sleek, svelte filly. But nobody mentioned the agony involved. To the 10th degree. My teeth will be ground to stumps long before I can feel my ribs again.
This class, they told me, is no ordinary gym class. They use super-duper special machines on which you get a top-to-tail workout, all very modern and grand. They’re weird-looking contraptions, very much like massage tables, but with ropes and pulleys and springs and all sorts of moving parts – a cross between an obstetric bed and a shipyard crane. They have a name I can never recall – something severe like “The Corrector” or “The Enforcer”. I sommer call it “The Torture Table”.
“Open, close, open, close! Move those knees! Butterfly wings! Pinch your bum, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!”
I squeeze and stretch and pinch. But my knees just won’t do the butterfly, they’ve developed a severe case of lockjaw.
The instructor’s ponytail bounces in my direction. “Gluteus maximus! Use your bum muscles, lift the pubis (ag nee sies,
Mom would say)! Squeeze, squeeze! Stabilise your core!”
I squeeze like crazy, all the while praying I don’t produce flatus with all this squeezing down under. Poor Mom would never survive that.
Then the trainer changes tactics and orders us to harness the stirrups. You heard me; these tables have stirrups. They reside somewhere behind your ears and you must lift your ankles right over your head to get your feet into them.
Ooh boy. And as if that’s not enough, the tabletop you’re lying on moves. It runs on fast sliding wheels and you must keep your wits about you, otherwise you slip right off. It takes a hellish effort to insert your ankles without ending up hung, drawn and quartered.
Now we must straighten our legs and lower our ‘stirruped’ feet, which makes the tabletop slide up beneath us. When we bend our knees, we slide down again. We’re working the quadriceps, our drill mistress tells us. Whatever, I think; can’t I just go home?
Whirring like crazy, everyone slides up and down on their tables. Everyone but me. One of my feet has slipped through the stirrup and the damn thing is stuck in the pudgy flesh of my calf.
The other foot is flailing with the pulleys whirring above my head and I become totally snarled up and askew. I grapple with the errant stirrup and the more I wriggle, the more entangled I get.
I lie there like an overcooked koeksister in a macramé experiment.
At the end of the lesson I make a dash for the door – never to return. But the mistress stops me. “Everyone struggles at first, but for a newcomer you did very well,” she says, and her ponytail bounces encouragingly. “Soon as your core is strong, the rest is easy. You’ll see.”
“Uhm, ok,” I say sheepishly as I smooth a self-conscious hand over the baroque contour of my hip. I sneak a peek at her delicately sculpted flanks. Somewhere, far beyond my core, perhaps between the quadriceps and the maximus, I sense a flicker of hope.
“Till tomorrow, then,” she says breezily.
“Till tomorrow,” I echo and wobble off.