Part of my evil plan to avoid motorized scooters for as long as possible includes working out. Now, like many of you, I believe that my natural habitat is the butt groove I have created on my couch or propped up against my headboard reading a book surrounded by small fuzzy animals. However, my doctor assures me that should I not also do some exercises most days, then someone will be spoon feeding me steaks for the rest of my life. So, I relented and started working out. And since I am a creature of habit (no, thank you, OCD!), when I took up regular exercise about ten years ago, I have not been able to stop. That and cleaning before bed. Again, OCD, you’re a real mensch.
I am a child of the 80s. When I was young, we played sports like baseball and football. Sure, there were some sophisticated kids in my neighborhood doing tennis or soccer or something else that’s mind numbingly boring, but I am part of the Little League generation. You want to get fit, active, and make friends? Put on polyester tights, yank a pair of cleats on, and put on a foam trucker’s cap that looked as if you were wearing a mailbox on your head. Then go out in 96-degree weather for 3 hours and play.
But as we grew up and wanted to stay active, baseball and football weren’t always an option. For one thing, finding 17 other people to play a sport wasn’t always easy. So, we ran. Had you gained some weight in the 1990s, you were told to eat only one sandwich a day (with Wonder Bread) and to go running. Getting older running was the thing. You wanted to lose a notch on your belt, go running. You needed to train off-season for rugby, go running. You were stressed, go running.
But I don’t like running. Oh I tricked myself pretty solidly into thinking I liked it for a while. It clears my head. I feel better after. Lies both. When I am stepping out of my house to go for a walk, I am elated. Whenever I was stepping out to go for a run, I was miserable. To boot, it never did anything for me. Aside from hating the world and all its inhabitants. Then there’s ‘the gym’. A concept I could never get. My first experience with a gym was in off-season high school football training sessions where other (much larger) guys were picking up heavy things on bars and putting them down again and then shouting at and hitting each other as if they’d caught the other guy lifting a tenner from his wallet. I would stand in the corner and stare at them both wondering of this strange alchemy and hoping to all deities everywhere that nobody would notice I was only doing pushups and doing stretching. Nobody did. Gyms never took for me even later. I know it’s a subculture that people enjoy or a time away from home. That I get. But I have never found the urge to leave my house to wait for exercise equipment with a bunch of sweaty people.
No, I go for HIIT workouts. The benefits of HIIT workouts are multiheaded. First, the biggie, is that you can do it in your home, in front of your TV, a few feet from your kitchen where your water and food live. Second, rarely is there an audience to my self-inflicted torture – except for the dog and the cat. The cat doesn’t care. The dog likes licking sweat off my face. And it’s near my couch, so if (read: when) my body gives out and I need to lie down and reacquaint myself with the numbers for emergency services, I have a comfortable place to do just that.
Also, HIIT workouts change. They are incredibly variable. So, five times a week, I write out a workout for myself that will both punish me and allow me to justify a late afternoon beer. Some of these are old standards: pushups, crunches, jumping jacks, burpees. But there is a whole world of HIIT exercises out there just waiting to torture and delight us as we lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. We can find a treasure trove of them on a website called YouTube. At this site, you find a cast of very fit characters whose entire existence revolves around making you cry. My go-to gangs are the folks at Fitness Blender, Tiff and Dan, Millionaire Hoy, Juice and Toya, and Lisa and Reese. They set the rounds, they come up with variations on simple exercises which make you vomit. The best thing is that you don’t need to keep an eye on your stopwatch and you don’t need to remember the next exercise on your list.
There are levels of intensity. I usually go for a 30-minute HIIT with or without dumbbells, depending on the day. But there are inherent levels of intensity too. Millionaire Hoy will exhaust you because he has you leaping and jumping around, but sometimes I can’t even manage to do what he asks. Now, jump on one foot and bring the other up to the wall and karate kick it and then do three backflips to your other wall and then climb that and when you get to the ceiling, do a split. Fitness Blender are usually my speed, so I do their things when I want to be sweaty but not eyeing up the heart monitor on my smartwatch with a terrified eye. Tiff and Dan are brutal, but when I really want a good workout, I go there or to Juice and Toya, who are brutal but have very positive attitudes, so you might die, but you will die happy.
No matter which I do, I enjoy these workouts because I know (more or less) what to expect. I don’t mean routine. I will try new workouts from them as well, without knowing what’s coming. This is sort of fun and it’s a good way for me to gather up new exercises to add to my own workout quiver. It’s 30 minutes and when they have sets, I am all the happier. I know how much I have to do and when that is finished, I can get on with my day and sweat for the next three hours.
This is why I take such offence to a finisher. See, some of these cheeky pricks tell you in the beginning of the workout everything it will entail. 4 sets of 3 exercises each. 30 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest. 3 sets of 5 exercises for 20 seconds each. It’s always clear. But once in a blue moon, you are told what the set list will entail and then you finish that workout – you think. And then they tell you – cheekily, I might add – oh no, that’s not all! We have a finisher!
A finisher is a last set or a single long set of exercises or one exercise meant to really exhaust you to the max. This way you should feel fully exhausted and sated by this last burst.
I hate it. This traces back to a high school football practice where our coach decided to make us run something insane like 20 or so laps around the field as punishment. He just kept blowing the whistle and off we’d go. It was the most miserable day of my life on a field. It wasn’t the running. It was the not knowing and not having control. Had I chosen to run 20 laps around a field, I would be fine with it. My hatred would only be pointed towards one chunky mad lad – me. But that day, Coach was the Empire and I was the rebel alliance. I wanted him dead.
A finisher to me is unfair. We agreed to terms for this workout. I will do what you demand of me and in return I get to stop when thing is finished. But when you give me a finisher – no, no, no. unfair. I have boycotted certain YouTube workout guys for this very reason and I stand by my position. I know that a finisher might keep me out of the scooter a bit longer, but is it really worth the back stabbing? I think not.
