Week of Determined Extra Movement: Day Two

Day two of my Week of Determined Extra Movement has passed, and the good news is that I’m no longer a puddle of flesh. I’m a tight hard knot of despairing pain, which may be a marginal improvement but doesn’t feel like one. Yesterday I attended Body Pump for the first time – an utterly bizarre synchronised weight-lifting session to thumping music. It was quite a novelty choosing my own colour-coded weights and loading them on to the bar, although after the warm-up routine I soon took them all off again. There were squats and lunges and a step contraption and trance music – it was the masculine gadget-filled grunt-fest to Body Balance’s feminine bare-footed meditational stretching. The muscles I used had never been used before, and were not pleased to be poked into wakefulness and given something large and heavy to hold aloft for forty-five minutes. Afterwards it hurt to put in my hair grips. It hurt to eat a banana. It hurt to SIT STILL AND DO NOTHING AT ALL. Clearly I’m not built for bicep curls, although judging by the freakish sinewy muscle loading of some of the women in there, I’m in the minority.   

It’s hard to think of something active to do when you feel like death, but I’m planning a spell of cross-trainering and maybe a bit of desultory cycling this lunchtime. The good news is the cycle machines are too far away from the TVs for me to be able to see anything more than a fuzzy-coloured blur, so I won’t have to watch any nitwits dithering over crockery purchases today. And really, that just makes the whole thing better.