“There's nothing quite like sweating through a painfully efficient workout followed by a hot shower in a cold bathroom, then stepping into a toasty pair of pyjamas and settling down with a cup of tea to unwind, and realising that you still have to take the rubbish out for tomorrow's early morning collection and it's blowing a gale and pouring with rain outside."
It was a good workout, though, comprising of three videos from Jessica Smith TV; one a yoga/strength-training mash-up, one more general aerobic circuit training, and the last a power-walking workout:
I admit to being a sweaty mess by the end, but one of the great things about the myriad of videos available from this online trainer is being able to choose a combination of exercises influenced by how I'm feeling, or what I think I need to concentrate on, which then become my nearly daily hour of self-induced torture health-improving cardio and/or strength-training. A pot-pourri of pain, if you will, or a pick-and-mix (for those of a British disposition) of muscle misery.
I moan, of course I do. It's hard work, and I make it even harder work for myself by pushing as physically hard as I can safely can, but in a positive let's-try-and-improve-my-quality-of-life way, not in a negative I-hate-myself-and-want-to-feel-even-worse way. Even though, yes, I moan about it. But as we both know, complaining is half the fun!
As a tiny, but relevant aside, I had a lovely catch-up with a dear friend recently, and conversation turned to jobs, bosses, earning a living, and that although we sometimes weren't keen on what we had to do or who we had to work with, we were glad (in a it-could-be-worse way) that we had the possibility of someone to rail against, something to throw our frustrations at, and in that respect we were fortunate because otherwise we might instead be railing at ourselves, perhaps even to the extent of hitting self-destruct buttons.
So in rather the same way, I moan about putting myself through challenging workouts, but in this case choosing to shoot the video messenger with my grumble gun, instead of shooting myself in the foot for being the one to impose such hardship in the first place.
I purposefully make it hard work for myself because I came to understand early on in the exercise process that you get out what you put in. I reckon that if I did my workout half-assed (as our American cousins so colourfully describe it) instead of whole-assed (or whatever the equivalent is) it would more than likely lead to retaining the full form of my entire derrière (and other wobbly bits that I want to de-wobble) for a much longer period of time, and therefore I'd have to work twice as long for the same end result than I would if I had thrown my entire energy at the workout in the first place.
Now, I know the mathematics, statistics and number-type thingies may not be so easy to manipulate (wordz ma thang, yo) so half-assed workouts may not precisely mean half as many calories lost, or twice as much work needed to create the same result, but you get the picture. I'm not really a lazy person, but if I can get my calories burnt or my muscles fatigued in an hour while sweating hard, instead of two hours of playing along with the videos, then I'll go with the first option. And, although my claim to a lack of numerical aptitude is true, I'm of the suspicion that one hour of full energy and muscle use, and two hours of perfunctory fannying around do not the same calorific deficiency make.
So I try to push myself to ensure I'm getting my money's worth (I'm Scottish - this analogy works for pretty much everything) out of this exercising-at-home-using-free-YouTube-videos lark by making sure they're intense, and then I moan about it. But I'd be moaning more if I knew it would be taking me twice as long to get to this chapter in my weight loss and getting healthy story just because I didn't give it my all in the first place!
But excuse me if I also moan about having to get changed out of my cosy jammies, and drag my rubbish bin down two-and-a-half storeys and out into the cold and rain. It's truly grumble-worthy!
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