hot or not?

I recently witnessed a rather heated online argument about whether or not it was unthinkable for a personal trainer to be overweight. (Started, as you might possibly imagine, by a personal trainer who was built more like Mr Blue Shorts above than Mr Green Shorts.) Plenty of people said they didn't care what their trainer looked like as much as what their trainer's clients looked like in their "after" shots.  Other people said they didn't care what their trainer looked like as much as they cared what he or she knew. Some people said it would depend on their goal. If they were aiming to lose weight, they'd prefer to train with someone who had been overweight themselves and had managed to change their body rather than someone who'd always been effortlessly thin. If they were aiming for maximal strength, they'd prefer an experienced powerlifter, whether said trainer were the stereotypical beefy, big-bellied powerlifter or a twig who didn't actually looked like she or he lifted when in normal clothes. And a minority of people agreed with the author of the original post: they thought a trainer should look like a fitness model, more or less, and they wouldn't hire someone who didn't.

So, what do you think? Does a trainer need to have a typical "hot" athletic-looking body*** for you to hire them?

I am perhaps biased in this, in that my beloved former trainer, the woman that turned me on to lifting heavy shit, was not particularly thin.  But holy crap, was she strong.  And she was encouraging and personable and enthusiastic about exercise.  She didn't need to look like Jamie Eason for me to trust what she told me and to look forward to working out with her. In fact, her looking like an average woman was probably even more encouraging.  It made me believe that I, also an average woman, could get strong too (well, maybe not as strong as her) if only I put the work in.

My old trainer doesn't train people any more, having taken a promotion in her other job, but the other trainers at my gym don't exactly fit the fitness model mode either.  One's a skinny middle-aged endurance athlete.  I wouldn't personally care to look like her, though many many women would, but if I wanted to eventually run a half-marathon or something, I'd be pleased to learn from her expertise.  One's a somewhat chunky young woman with a degree in exercise science. I don't know for sure, but I wonder whether she was a college athlete in one of those sports where having a bit of extra weight on you is to your advantage.  If I were an overweight person who wanted to become more fit, I'd be really comfortable training with her, someone who isn't thin but is very fit.  There's an older male trainer who looks utterly average in every way and a younger male trainer who looks relatively athletic but isn't overly ripped or muscular.  I see no reason I wouldn't train with either of them provided they could help me with my goals and our personalities clicked.

So, yeah, I guess I am firmly on the my-trainer's-looks-don't-much-matter side.  Which I suppose is fortunate, since I'd like to get into training people and I am in no danger of looking like Jamie Eason myself any time soon. Or, y'know, ever.

xoxo

***let me make clear that I don't think looking like a fitness model is necessary for actually being hot. In fact Mr Blue Shorts there has a little too much pec and visible abs for my own personal preference.

dear mr obama

Oh, DON'T WORRY. I'm not about to get all political up in here. No, I'm just gonna engage in some of my usual self-indulgent whining. Because everyone likes that even better. Right? Right????!!!???

Ahem. Okay, so I've been back in the gym for about two months now and back to heavy lifting for six weeks or so. In some ways I'm happy with my progress. My squats aren't back at pre-op levels, but they're coming along nicely.  I hadn't dumbbell benched in six months or probably longer, but when I tried it the other day, I shocked myself at how much I didn't completely suck.  My lat pulldowns are very close to being back to where they were in September.  Because I haven't been able to deadlift much (more about that VERY SOON), I've been doing a lot of direct trap work I wasn't doing prior to surgery and my shrug and farmers walks weights keep increasing nicely.  I've discovered a great new glute exercise--kneeling squats--and every single time I do those, I add weight to the bar.  So, yeah, certain things are coming along nicely, and since my intestines haven't yet fallen out of my hooha in the middle of the gym floor, I'm getting less nervous about that possibility by the day.

But. (Of course there's a but.) Certain things are really fucked.  Even though I had only the tiniest of external incisions, my abs still apparently took a beating. And not being able to lift anything heavier than my freaking purse for 5 1/2 weeks (and I wasn't even lifting that at first!) didn't help. Since I've been back to lifting, every time I've experimented with any deadlift-type movement, like RDLs or rack pulls, even with for-me baby weights, I've had the sensation that I was this close to effing my back up seriously or I was out of proportionately sore and wrecked for days after. All I can figure is that my core is so imbalanced right now, my back so much stronger than my abs, that the low back is completely taking over in stabilizing me during deadlifting as well as, y'know, doing the work it's supposed to.  Apparently when I squat the fact that my low back is stabilizing my core disproportionately skates by because my low back isn't also doing most of the work of the lift. That's my theory anyway.

Oh, and I can't even do one chin up any more, when I used to be able to do 8 or 9 in a row and 4 or 5 pull ups. When I tried on the assisted pull up machine at the gym, I had to use 25lbs of assist. Which is just too demoralizing, yo.  Since, as I mentioned, my lat pulldowns are almost where I was pre-op, it's not a lat issue. It's got to be my core.  Or my fear of engaging my core that much? Feh.

It's not all of my ab/anterior core muscles though, either. I can still plank without much trouble. I went to a trx class last week just for shits n' giggles and I busted out a bunch of crunches in it without any trouble (which frankly surprised me) but then we did this other ab thing at the end that involved keep your legs up off the floor and after a couple, I just laid back down till everyone else was done. Lulz. So maybe it's a hip flexor weakness? Did my gyn do something to my psoas??!????! Horrors! (Lulz again.)

Which brings me back to our post title. Dear Mr Obama, can we get universal health care to cover post-hysterectomy physical therapy for old women who still want to powerlift? I really would like a professional who's smarter than me to do a shitload of tests on me and tell me exactly what muscle imbalance I have and how to fix it, but I can't afford to pay for one.  Kthxbai.

Alright, if you suffered through all that whining and self-absorbed navel-gazing, here's my real navel and scars for your trouble. Pretty tiny, huh? Modern surgery is the ballz. Even if it did disrupt my psoas or something.

And here's my new favorite exercise!

See? Just like hip thrusts without all that embarrassing lying on your back on the gym floor humping the air business.

xoxo

the intersection of two obsessions

I've been organizing the FUCK outta my house post New Years, spurred on by approximately 5,483 different blogs and websites that I regularly read that made declutter your shit, yo their theme for the month.  If you haven't been forced to view the pictures of what I've been doing to my kitchen cabinets or made to listen to me wax rhapsodic about the Container Store, well, count your blessings, reader. Count your blessings.  However, some of this has also gently snuck into my gym life as well.

I give you, the GRID-IT:

See all my gym essentials neatly corralled so that they won't end up in a jumble at the bottom of my bag?  I saw this online (on one of those 5,483 websites telling me to get myself in order, of course) and had to have it. Had to have it so much I paid the extra $4 to get the color I wanted. I mean, the red one was on sale, but that would clash with my iPod. God. A person has to have some standards.

Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that this thing doesn't hold more, but that's my own fault for not having a smaller log book, huh?  I'll report back and let y'all know how this thing works out in practice. Right now I'm just busy being smug about how all my stuff has a place.

xoxo

back to our normal programming

Happy New Year, boys and girls!

As my close personal friends may know, New Years Eve and I do not get along. I have had many crappy ones in the course of my life from the truly horrible (the one with the vicious family argument, the one with the stroke of midnight in the ED when my stoned future ex-husband managed to put some glass through his hand, the one spent drinking alone and crying and entertaining some mild suicidal ideation) to the only-funny-in-retrospect (the year our Chinese food delivery took five hours to arrive with phone calls from the restaurant every 45 mins promising that it was really on its way this time so our hopes kept being raised and dashed, my senior year in high school when I had a little too much fun and woke up the next morning at 6 am for my nursing home housekeeping job still buzzed after 3 hours sleep and proceeded to spend the next 8 hours throwing up into every fourth toilet I cleaned) to the merely banal (freezing my arse off at First Night with a cranky kid or kids who could have really given a fuck about the ice sculptures and puppet shows, freezing my arse off at First Night with adults who thought it was perfectly reasonable to stand around in 15 degree weather waiting for some damn fireworks). At some point in the last several years, I faced the fact that New Years Eve is not for me. Since then, I have treated it like any other night, albeit one with a Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy channel. This way happiness lies.

It occurred to me this morning, however, that long before I learned to hate New Years Eve, I actually hated January 1st. When I was just a kid, New Years meant vacation was over and the return to school was imminent. And because we only had maybe six tv channels then, all that was on tv was bowl games. Since I had even less interest in college football when I was a little girl than I do now (less than zero? hmmm) this meant I didn't even have anything to distract me. New Years Day meant boredom, anxiety, and sadness.

As an adult, none of that applies. Oh, January 1 still means the holidays are coming to a close and there's a certain sadness to that in a way: at least here in The Land of Crappy Weather, the beginning of January means at least a couple of months ahead of cold, snow, ice, freezing drizzle, and darkness without the distraction of celebrations, sparkly decorations, and people giving you prezzies. It means the slog of winter is upon us. But it also means the psychological promise of a fresh start, a blank slate. There's a sense of hope. This is gonna be the year I'll [lose weight, learn French, start running, get the finances in order, make the bed every day, insert resolution here].  Of course most of those resolutions fall by the wayside sometime before mid-February, but on January the First they all seem so promising. Everything seems to hold just a little bit of promise, bitter experience not withstanding.

This is why I ordered a bunch of stuff from the Container Store. This is why the front desk of the Y has been clogged with people signing up for new memberships for the last week or ten days. (Oh sweet baby Jesus, I just want to get swiped in and obtain a locker key. It shouldn't take 4 minutes and 17 seconds.) We all have a wee smidgen of hope and a big pile of soon-to-run-out determination that this year we'll kick ass and take names. Hey! It could happen.

If you need me, I'll be inside a kitchen cabinet putting my pot lids in order.  Probably best to avoid the gym for a day or two while the newbies are learning not to walk too close to the squat rack.

xoxo

i wrote something

Totally off topic, but I'll just drop it here and hope someone reads it. Peace.

This morning on CNN they had a poll question for their audience: should Nancy Lanza be considered a victim along with all the other people her son murdered?  To say that my mouth literally dropped open would not be an exaggeration. In internet parlance, double you tee eff?  We’re really asking this question?

Let’s parse this.  If Nancy Lanza had been shot to death by her son who then killed himself without first going on to also shoot a whole bunch of uninvolved people presumably unknown to him, most of them tiny children, would anyone be considering her anything other than a tragic victim of domestic violence and/or the sad casualty of a loved one’s apparent mental illness?  But because her child did take out a whole bunch of other innocent people, she is...at fault?  She...deserves to be dead?  Is that what we’re saying here?

Shall we examine what exactly she is supposed to be responsible for?  Not knowing what her adult child was planning? Not stopping him?  Having weapons available for him to use in his killing spree?  Or, most simply, being a bad mother? Every time I think my feelings about this sort of thing have been blunted by time, another horrible news event occurs and the resulting coverage by people who know nothing and understand nothing brings them to the fore.

Six and a half years ago, my then-20 year old son, my only child, whom I love more than I could possibly love anyone else, was on a locked ward for two and a half months, being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.  Schizoaffective disorder: either a really really bad form of bipolar disorder or a milder form of schizophrenia, but in any case, not really anything with which you’d want someone you care about being diagnosed. It wasn’t his first diagnosis. Since he first became really sick his senior year in high school, various clinicians had posited first bipolar disorder, then depression with psychotic features.  But somewhere around the beginning of June 2006 during that long inpatient stay, the S word was first brought up.  It was devastating to me.  Before that, as heartbroken and frightened as I was by his problems, I was certain that all we needed was to get him on the right medication and get him to stay on it and then we’d all live happily ever after. But schizophrenia? That seemed like a living death sentence to me. That was something no one ever got better from. That was crazy dirty homeless people shouting at the voices in their heads on street corners. That was...people committing atrocities because of their delusions.

One summer night, in amongst this little slice of hell, I was leaving the locked ward after the visiting hour. (By the way? When you visit your 20 year old son on a locked ward, your belongings are searched and you aren’t supposed to have physical contact with him. It’s like prison. Prison for people whose only crime is being sick. I disobeyed the no physical contact rules regularly and without shame. Try to keep me from hugging, kissing, and holding the hand of someone I love when they’re so sad and so scared they’re shaking and crying. Try.)  On my way out, his case manager stopped me to tell me what a nice, sweet, polite kid he was. “You did a good job with him,” she said kindly.  “Apparently not,” I answered, choking back the tears that immediately welled up. “Or he wouldn’t be here.”  “Oh, no. No. You know that’s not true, don’t you? It’s not your fault that he’s sick, Andrea.”


I will never forget that woman’s kind words, both her praise of my son, and her reassurance that I was not to blame.  Because, believe me, when you have a child with mental illness you will blame yourself, and as CNN helpfully reminded me this morning, so will other people.  Because no one really knows yet what causes schizophrenia though there are dozens of theories, you will take each one of those theories you hear or read about and apply them to yourself, always with culpability.  Heredity? Yeah, it’s your bad genes or those of that person you were foolish enough to breed with. Exposure to toxins or a virus in utero? Oh my god, it must have been the flu you had in your 7th month or those chemicals at work that weren’t supposed to be a pregnancy risk.  Childhood trauma? You got a divorce. You had a house fire. Cannabis usage in adolescence? You should have somehow prevented him ever trying marijuana in high school.  Etc. And etc.  

Then there’s the blame you ascribe to yourself, and everyone else ascribes to you, in intervening.  You shouldn’t have let them put him on antidepressants in high school! No, you should have had him on antidepressants sooner! You should have--somehow--gotten him to keep taking medication and going to psychiatrists and therapy even when he was over 18 and refused to. Somehow. That’s the heartbreak just about everyone with a mentally ill loved one knows about. You can’t force them to get help. You can’t force them to comply with treatment. And except in extraordinary circumstances, neither can anyone else.  Basically you have to be actively threatening yourself or someone else before you can be forced into treatment.  Prior to my son’s hospitalization in 2006, he’d been off all psychotropic medications for over a year and a half and I’d watched him getting sicker and sicker. Watched him helplessly.

There was the summer of mania where he paced the house endlessly, read an entire encyclopedia front to back (searching for hidden messages?), went for walks in the middle of the night leaving the front door wide open, snapped at you whenever you spoke to him, and entirely stopped bathing.  There was the winter and spring of deep depression and eventual auditory hallucinations, where he just got very quiet and sad, showered for hours, watched the same DVDs over and over again (searching for hidden messages?), became afraid to sleep in his own bedroom, and never left the house at all.  And all that time all I could do was wait. Wait for him to agree to go to the doctor. Or wait for something horrible to happen.

The last few days before his admission, he was obviously getting more and more frightened and afraid to be by himself and admitted finally that he was hearing voices. The night he was admitted, he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t settle, was going from room to room, listening to the walls. I convinced him at last to call 911 so that they could “give him something to sleep” in the ED. When the EMTs came, they told him his pulse was racing and his blood pressure was very high, and he agreed to go with them. If he hadn’t, they couldn’t have made him. He wasn’t threatening suicide. He wasn’t violent. Well, not until he decided midway through the trip to the hospital to attempt to fight off the EMT and try to leap out of the back of the ambulance so he could “answer the white phone.” That sort of sealed his sojourn on the locked ward. Thankfully.

So, Nancy Lanza.  We don’t know what was wrong with her 20 year old son that made him kill her and kill himself and commit an atrocity.  Apparently he was “on the spectrum.”  He was also at the prime age to have a first psychotic break, but with him dead and his computer destroyed, we have no clear cut evidence that he was in fact delusional or, if he was, what form that delusion took. We don’t know if he was, rather than being delusional, simply sociopathic. We don’t know. We’ll never know.  But do I think that if his mother thought he was a danger to himself or anyone else, she’d have had weapons where he could get at them? No.  Do I think she was probably where I was seven years ago, watching her son struggle with an illness she could do nothing to intervene in and waiting for him to agree to get help, all the time thinking (hoping, praying), “oh, we just need ____ to happen and everything will be okay”? Yes.  Do I judge her? No.  Does my heart break for her as much as for the parents of all those babies her son shot? Yes.  

Do I think it’s disgusting a major news outlet would question whether this dead woman was a victim? Oh, fuck yeah.

One last thought: I couldn’t watch the tributes to the victims--how this little girl loved horses and that little boy liked to play with his cousins--without thinking that had Adam Lanza died when he was six, someone would have said such things about him.  No matter what heinous acts he committed, he was once someone’s little boy.

xoxo

My own story has, of course, a much happier ending. My son was never violent. He got help, is on a good combination of medications to control his illness, and is committed to complying with treatment.  As his mother I of course wish he didn’t have to suffer with a lifelong illness, but I’ve come a long way since I thought this was a living death sentence.  It’s not.  Mental illness, like diabetes or epilepsy or cancer, sucks, but all you can do is keep trying to kick its ass.

switch it up, yo

Ever look around the gym and realize you, and everyone else, are doing the same ol', same ol' exercises? Nothing wrong with the basics. You won't go wrong doing back squats and bench press and lat pulldowns and planks. But sometimes it's fun to throw in something new and different too. Bonus points if it makes your fellow exercisers stare and think what the HELL is s/he doing????  Amirite? I'm right.

Since I've noticed a bunch of my friends and, okay, myself, throwing some fun and funky exercises into our workouts lately, I thought I'd hunt down some instructional videos on youtube and share the luv.

Suitcase deadlifts:


Good morning squats:


Waiters carry:


Lumberjack squats:


And for the truly ambitious among us, the headstand leg lift:


I think I'll work on getting into the headstand first.

xoxo

i have consumer confidence in YOU

In lieu of wrapping the pile of Christmas presents sitting on the floor of my bedroom, washing my kitchen floor***, or doing anything else useful, I think I shall take this opportunity to present to you Andrea's Second Annual Holiday Gift Guide. And this year, you actually get it before Christmas. Always thinking of ways to serve you better, readers, 24/7 365.

1.) Gaiam yoga socks

Oh, look, that's your esteemed blog hostess doing her own modelling. More ways to serve you, readers! Just sayin'.

I don't, or at least haven't, worn these to do yoga. No, I have worn them to do my formerly barefoot (aka monkey feet) squats. I like to feel the floor under me and grip it with my feet, so much so that I was willing to risk athlete's foot or MSRA from those gross gym floors. With these Gaiam yoga socks, I don't have to. All the benefits of monkey feet, none of the squat rack health risks! Highly recommended stocking stuffer for the maladjusted weightlifter in *your* life. (Note: one of my friends is completely freaked out by the idea of toe socks; proceed with caution.)

2.) The Anatomy Coloring Book

Another great stocking stuffer! (Or, y'know, main gift if you're a cheap bastard. I don't know your life.)  I had one of these in massage school and I'm close to pulling the trigger on buying a new one.  We've got a long, cold winter upon us. Face it: we'll all probably get snowed in at one point or another. On those days blizzard conditions make it impossible to get to the gym or go for a run, your giftee can spend his or her time profitably learning the names of their individual quad muscles and hamstrings! Plus, coloring is fun. (Note: be a sport and throw in a nice box of colored pencils or markers. You don't want your giftee to have to venture out to the store in that blizzard when they realize all they have in the house is a #2 pencil and some ballpoints they stole from work.)

3.) North Face Osito jacket

Soooooo very soft. I've been known to visit this jacket in the athletic wear department of Nordstrom just to pet it. Don't judge. (Note: I just pet it, I haven't purchased it, SANTA. Ahem.)

4.) inversion table

I personally have always wanted one of these. Well, always since about 1996 when I first saw one in a Relax the Back store. And, no, not just for illicit sexual purposes. Having my spine decompressed sounds like a peachy idea, and I'm sure it feels just as good as having "traction" done during a massage. Besides, I could maybe grow an inch, which, when you are my size and probably shrinking even as we speak, is not to be sneezed at. So, yeah. If you have any tense, crunched-up short people on your gift list (and they enjoy head rushes), I suggest checking one of these things out! (Note: see the disclaimers about pregnancy and eye and back disorders. We here at MMINAE do not want to be responsible for anyone detaching a retina, yo.)

5.) The Yin Yoga Kit

I have recommended and/or loaned this out to so many people in the five years I've owned it and mentioned it so much on here before that I would be remiss in not including it in a gift guide. Your giftee's fascia will thank you. You want all your loved ones to have happy fascia, right? Right! (Note: yes, it's very hippy-dippy.  Deal.)

6.) Liquid Grip

Another Andrea-approved stocking stuffer. Gym doesn't allow chalk? Just don't want to deal with the mess?  Liquid Grip is non-messy, dirt cheap, lasts forever, and it works. (Note: it smells awesome too! Some women want to smell like Chanel No 5, some wanna smell like the weight room...)

7.) Nike+ sportwatch

I'm not much of a runner personally but I've heard good things about these. And you know I like gadgets. You probably know and love someone who likes gadgets too and who actually runs more than four times a year, so what are you waiting for? (Note: would the gps on this thing have helped me when I almost got lost and died 500 yards from my house? Probably not. You should probably still buy one, though!)

8.) "everything fits" gym bag

I swear to god, I don't work for Gaiam, I just like their stuff. (Note: they should probably send me some swag though, right?)

9.) stripey knee socks

You know you know someone who wants to deadlift in style. Save the shins! (Note: Rumor has it that Tarzhay is also a good source for these. And if they made it easier for me to grab a pic from their website, I'd have linked to them. But they didn't. So eff u, Target!)

10.) earbuds

C'mon, everyone always needs new earbuds. Those of us with weird ears like the ones that go in the ear canal and have the adjustable rubber bits. (Note: "adjustable rubber bits *is* the technical term. God.)

There. Ten gift ideas for your fit family and friends. Now get shopping! I know you can do it.

xoxo

***Amazing how much I wanted to do this when my doctor wouldn't let me and how much I don't want to do it now that I can any time I want. Ironic, Alanis, ironic.