"Your body can stand almost anything; it is your mind that you must convince."
-- The W.O.W. Fitness website
"Help meeeeeeeeee!"
-- The Talkmistress's body
It was circa 2003 that I began chronicling my adventures as an early-middle-ager who'd subjected herself to that most sought after and avoided of self-improvement experts: a fitness trainer.
Since those days, my fitness adventures have included Zumba DVDs and classes; then freestyle dancing to cable-channel house and Latin hip-hop music; then chair workouts on YouTube.
But for a while now, my main mode of exercise has been crawling into a chair or bed. I began to wonder how tough it might be to resume gym workouts as an older middle-ager ... one with recurring, mild but notable left-leg/knee/lower-back/left-wrist pain.
Kameelah Harris had that answer.
Kameelah is a trainer and executive director of W.O.W. Fitness (War on Weight) in southwest Little Rock (wow-fitness.com). The comprehensive fitness center offers a full gym with open personal training, a boot camp and a number of classes. Kameelah recently celebrated her 10th anniversary in business.
It was here that, on July 8, I ventured upon what became a two-week period to find out whether I still had any gym stamina in me. Prior to our meet-up, I shared my litany of aches with Kameelah, who said she'd keep in mind the possibility of chair workouts.
The best time for us to meet turned out to be ... 5 a.m. I wasn't sure which would be tougher -- the workout itself or getting up before the chickens the day after the Fourth of July weekend to darken the door of a gym for the first time in eons. Somehow I managed to arrive a bit early. Kameelah graciously welcomed me into her domain. After I filled out a form and submitted to a weigh-in (I refused to look) and some body-parts measuring, the fun began.
The exercise bike, a welcome old friend from gym days of yore, was there to provide the cardio portion of this hour of circuit training. The challenges came in the form of anaerobic exercises that varied from day to day and (to me) felt like Marine Corps boot camp on crack. This was stuff I wondered if Arnold Schwarzenegger could perform in his Mr. Olympia days. Worse, some exercises involved -- gah! -- having to get down on a floor mat beforehand and -- gah! -- hoist myself back up afterward. And what sadist invented planks?! Each workout left me a panting human waterfall of hot-flash-enhanced sweat.
But I kept at it, thanks largely to Kameelah's gentle-but-efficient, encouraging manner. If I dug in my heels on any activity, she'd suggest a modified version of it instead. By the way, the only time a chair was presented was as an alternative to traditional squats.
Ah, but that soreness, though.
As the first day's first workout came to an end, Kameelah warned that I'd be sore in the morning. I shrugged it off. Having stopped and restarted working out more than I'd care to count, I was used to protesting muscles. What I didn't expect was waking up the next morning feeling as though I'd been run over by a convoy of speeding monster trucks. For the next few days, I moved around like the late Tim Conway in those classic Carol Burnett Show skits, playing "The Oldest Man" -- a fogey with disheveled gray hair who walked in an excruciatingly slow, tiny-step shuffle. I became my own version of that character, complete with the messy hair I couldn't raise my sore arms to fix.
Then, there's the eating plan. Regular readers know that for the past couple of years, I've preached a ketogenic, or very low-carbohydrate, way of eating. Despite constantly falling off that wagon, I figured I'd be a keto groupie for life. Next thing I knew, I was trying W.O.W. Fitness' advocated four-phase eating plan, which kicks off with vegetarian "detox" eating. It calls for unlimited vegetables and -- gulp -- fruit. And -- gulp again -- limited brown rice. And beans. And ... and ... oatmeal?! I feared that such unabashed carb eating would cause me to blow up like that chick in the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the one who turned into a giant, round human blueberry and had to be rolled away by the Oompa Loompas. But so far, so good.
Sure enough, just as Kameelah assured, the muscle and joint soreness began to ease the second week. By Thursday of Week Two, the muscle aches had indeed all but disappeared. A second weigh-in revealed -- as my loosening clothes had already indicated -- a loss of four pounds.
By the time this column debuts, I'll be gearing up for Week 4 ... not only because I want to see how far I get with this, but also because of fear that the physical hassles associated with starting over once again would be even more whimper-worthy the next time around. That is, if the Oompa Loompas hadn't carried me off by then.
Progress report to come.
Weigh in with your email:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 07/28/2019