Club Fit personal trainer Erick Omondi
has his hands full with Bruce the Blog on the treadmill.
BY BRUCE APAR
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF + PUBLISHER
NORTH COUNTY NEWS
In the Talking Points column in December 12 NCN (”Ring in the New Year, Wring out the Old Pear Shape,” page 9), the Pillsbury Doughboy body double in the above photo writes about starting his new three-month regimen of cardio and strength training workouts at Club Fit in Jefferson Valley.
Since filing that report, I subjected myself for the first time, on Tuesday, December 11, to the weight circuit at the club’s Fit Zone.
For starters, the humbling factor is evident immediately, with men and women of various ages and body types doing some serious pumping of iron. Once upon a time, I would have been a lot more sheepishly self-conscious about placing the pin in the LifeFitness weight stack at 30 pounds (for arm curls) or 150 pounds (for leg press). Not now.
It’s one of the benefits of being both a certain age and having gone through some extreme life experiences that finding yourself the 230-pound weakling among buff bods in a gym — including buff bods your age and older — is hardly worth sweating over. Especially since, once you start exhaling with the weight press and inhaling on the depress, there’s plenty to sweat about.
Apart from the orientation circuit from three weeks prior, when Personal Trainer Erick Omondi set my weight levels, this was my first solo tour of the weight circuit. At that time, he also recorded on my logsheet the height to set the seat and proper angle to set other machine parts to ensure each exercise is performed for optimal effectiveness. I had to relearn where the settings were on each machine the second time because so many days had elapsed since the first workout. This is all a lot simpler and quicker to do than it sounds on paper. Each setting takes about a second or two.
Before hitting the weights, though, my workout routine calls for 10 minutes on the treadmill as a warmup. I did that, if ill advisedly since I was still wincing a tad from a foot injury that makes my right heel very tender to the touch.
My (much) better half, Elyse, who is disgustingly fit and a regular at Solaris, and also uses a treadmill, elliptical trainer and free weights at home (the show-off!), strongly suggested I instead use a stationary cycle or elliptical machine. But you know the weaker sex, otherwise known as the male species: we don’t listen “too good” (to quote pro athletes, who don’t talk too well), especially when it is wise advice via our know-it-all spouses.
I went through the Fit Zone circuit with little trouble, completing two sets of 12 repetitions on seven of eight pieces of equipment prescribed for this beginner (even though I’ve belonged to gyms intermittently over the years — remind me to tell you about my exploits at the legendary McAlpin Gym on Herald Square in Manhattan, which I joined after landing my first job after college; the morning after my first workout, I couldn’t walk upright. I was tripping on lactic acid).
The three leg workouts — press, extension and curl — were challenging but otherwise tolerable. The leg curl, though, was the hardest of the three for me. The chest press and upper back exercise were manageable enough. Where I did run into more than my match was the shoulder press, where I completed the first set of 12 reps, but started to fail on Rep Number 6 of the second set and only could make it to Rep Number 8. Talk about humbling.
The circuit finishes with machines for biceps and triceps, followed by a 10- to 15-minute cooldown. After pedaling half-heartedly on a cycle for less than that duration, I ambled over to the magazine rack where I spotted a Rush Limbaugh magazine (of sorts), filled with commentary that is a lot more about what he opposes than what he favors. Notably, the address label on the magazine was furiously blotted out with a pen, presumably by the subscriber for reasons of privacy or self-consciousness, or both.
