BodyPain: The First Timer's Gym Experience

I am terribly unfit, my arms are incredibly weak, my running speed is very low, I cannot climb on monkey bars, I cannot do push-ups, my stamina is very little, the list goes on. I am a little above 80kg in weight and about 180cm tall, and the BMI tells me that I am a little overweight.

I joined a gym to fix all this. Until I get paid for advertising, I don't think I'm gonna say which gym. I've only been to the gym 3 times in total, the first time to sign up, the other 2 to actually work out. Sort of.

On day 1, I was brought around by a Personal Trainer (PT) who showed me how to use most of the equipment in the gym. Well, most of the machines anyway. He didn't really teach me much about dumbbells and weights.

I started out with the treadmill. The machine was kind of noisy, the PT was looking at its parts, so I guess it's not supposed to be like that. So I walked, jogged, and ran on it while surfing between Star Movies, MTV, and National Geographic with no sound. Felt dizzy after, not sure if it's normal for treadmill-goers or if it's just me, since that was the first time I went on a treadmill (a moving one anyway).

After that, I was brought to a few machines that worked on the leg muscles and the butt. I had no problems with that, but the weight setting was between 1 and 3 though. Later, I did all the machines that focused on arm muscles. There was a separate machine for shoulders, biceps, triceps, and I'm not sure what other arm components. This is where I started to lose it. Consciousness I mean.

I suppose I overworked my arms, but I really gotta try that machine again later on. So I almost fainted, the PT then brought me to a mat for me to lie down and a ball to put my legs on. This was to let blood flow back to my head or something. This was also when Alia came and commented that I was lying down while she was busy sweating her butt off.

Once I was finally able to get up, I went for the abdominal exercises. The machine for the abdomen sucked, so the guy brought me to one of those benches where he showed me how to do sit-ups and.. something else I don't know what it's called. But it's all for the abdomen.

Thus ended Day 1 of Gym.

My second day happened yesterday, where I started out with this elliptical thingy (I won't bother explaining this device. Go google.) for a few minutes and I was already sweating. Alia was exercising right next to me... sort of. There was some kind of machine error or something at the time. Then suddenly someone came by and said "we're about to start the BodyPain BodyPump class!"

My first ever workout class. I didn't know what to expect... OK, so maybe I did. I was expecting my body parts to hurt at the end of the class and I was also expecting to eventually build muscles from whatever activity we were about to do.

BodyPump was quite fun actually. Sure there were some things I couldn't do, such as push-ups. Others, such as the lunge, burnt my thighs a while, but it was still quite fun. Probably because me and Alia couldn't do too many of it and laughed at each other. Hahahaha.. The parts with the weightlifting caused my arms to tremble a lot. That one part where the finale involved lifting the weights straight up above you caused a little bit of abdominal pain for me. The trainer was like "OK now big finish! Lift it high above your head!" Everyone kept it high for about 8 seconds, I only got to about 5.

So in the end, we went home with a lot of body sores. Some of which came later than others. The next gym session will be interesting, not sure whether I'll be working out while fasting or after.