Stupid song of the day

Seriously, what the hell is this?

New leg workout

I picked up a new leg workout from a bodybuilder at work, and it has left my legs a quivering mess. With my shoulder injury, I have been unable to workout my upper body which really sucks hard for me. Once it has healed I am going to hit it hard and get big, but until then why not get my legs to where I want them? With that said, the list of workouts left me kind of wondering why it seemed so light. I will work out my legs for at least a good hour and it is not too often I get sore anymore, but my leg strength and size are something I attribute to years of skateboarding. I do the list to the letter and while it was a much shorter workout and a more difficult one, I thought everything was fine. So about 12 hours later, a massive pump and soreness set in to such a degree it was uncomfortable to use the toilet, to sit, and to stand. I have never had such a delay in soreness and it hit me so hard. Needless to say, this is a nice set of workouts.

Also, I have started to mix some oats with my whey protein drink to get all the carbs and what-not in. I'm not a fan of a chunky drink like that but it is very efficient and I am nothing if not efficient.

Shoulder injury

Perhaps it was inevitable. I am nursing a shoulder injury. Part of it could be that I work in a gym and find it difficult not to want to work out when I am already there and are always picking up new exercises I want to try. I had tightness around my shoulder which is gone but I have an odd sensation around the rotator cuff area in front and oddly enough in back which makes me think I might have pinched a nerve. But I have no pain and full range of motion. I started doing pushups and light chest exercises again and somehow those seem to help my shoulder as the motion makes the sensation go away. I will likely see a chiropractor soon and I already picked one out. Look for the story on that experience soon.

R.I.P. Lifestyle Family Fitness

A bit of a disclaimer, part of this blog was written a while back:

So far this year, I lost my job at the school and my gym at Cardinal Fitness. So imagine my shock to get an email from Lifestyle Family Fitness telling me that I will be out of a job at the end of November because they decided to close half their gyms and focus operations entirely in Florida. So Life Time Fitness bought two of Lifestyle Family Fitness's gyms in Indiana and all of LFF's members and stuck us with the task of keeping order until closing time. With two weeks to know I am losing another job due to reasons out of my control, you can imagine how well I handled it. All along, my supervisors kept telling me that no matter what, the are going to take me with them, that I am one of them, I have nothing to worry about, and they had me fill out new hire paperwork for Life Time and very quickly moved me to one of the gyms that Life Time purchased to continue running the desk until a management job came along. It was nuts. Things moved exceedingly fast. By the time it was all said and done, I found myself hired into two Life Time locations with a strong possibility that I will be moving into management soon.

It was funny because Life Time is where I wanted to be all along. After seeing the main gym I tried for three years to at least get an interview and kept getting passed up. And now I am an employee and they see that I am easily relocatable and very much want this.

I never thought that taking a job with Lifestyle Family Fitness would land me with a company that I have wanted to work for, and while I miss some of the members there, I can tell you that I am glad that company is also behind me.

The comedy left turn

I've been working in the fitness field for nearly a year and a half now and I've seen and dealt with a lot. Now in my case most of these experiences come from one severely dysfunctional gym member, but today I will not talk about that giant ball of madness.

Today, I will talk about this giant ball of madness: a woman comes into the gym today to cancel her membership due in part to reasons I will talk about in full soon in this blog. The short version is that the gym I work at is closing in a few days and a different gym already bought up everyone's memberships. This woman was a member at the gym that bought said memberships and she is absolutely not going to go back to that gym for personal reasons. I give her the phone number to make the call to cancel and she gives me an endless run of shit saying she's been trying to cancel that way for a week now and she just can't get ahold of anyone. That's always a red flag in the customer service world because trying for a week usually means spent five minutes on the phone, if that, and didn't get the immediate result she wanted. So I pretty much called her on it and delved deeper into why she's so adamant about not going back to that gym. She says the people there are crazy and she can't be since she is blonde and looks like an Italian leather boot. I asked her to explain what she meant by crazy since I've been at that gym several times lately and haven't run into any of the silliness she claims is going on, so I'm absolutely positive this woman is the problem and not everyone else around her. And the answer I got knocked me on my ass. The short version is that this woman is racist, she hears all those other people talking in other languages and it absolutely must be all about her. She thinks black people are gross. So she's just going to join the women's only gym because she is so sure it will only be filled with the whitest folk around because she deserves at least that because she's white, you know.

I've heard a lot of reasons people want to cancel their gym memberships but racism is an entirely new one on me.

Murder By Death

I spoke so far of the skateboard demo that pretty much made me realize that I needed to evolve and embrace weightlifting. And the video game that made me realize I need to put that stuff down and focus on more important things such as my health.

For a while, I had been struggling with the fact that my ideologies will not lead me to personal happiness and since the group of people I ran with largely shared the same ideologies, I realized that I was stuck in a rut. But the fruition of that realization hit me while waiting in line for a show.

The band was Murder by Death, a band I had not heard of but knew was popular within the punk/indie scene so I was interested in checking them out. They were playing in Bloomington at a theater so I got there about ten minutes early and waited in a very short line. Within a couple minutes, the line grew very quickly and was largely made of of people dressed in their punk costumes - their black dyed hair, jackets with patches everywhere, that sort of thing. After one long look at the line, I decided not to attend this show. I stepped out and walked home.

Punk is fun for a few years but if you choose to become educated you realize you are always angry for the sake of being angry. Something will always keep you in a pissy mood. The idea of standing against for the sake of standing against becomes old.

As for the way of dress, why still dress like an early 80s punk rocker? Why show the world you and your ideologies refuse to evolve no matter how far you get left behind?

I still have never seen Murder by Death, nor have I even bothered to search them out on the internet to hear some of their stuff. Not really sure if it matters.

R.I.P. Cardinal Fitness

Very recently, it was announced that Cardinal Fitness has closed several locations without notice with the remaining locations closing at the end of the year. L.A. Fitness bought out all their member contracts and are setting up Cardinal's member base within L.A.'s clubs. Now I am not a fan of L.A. Fitness as I feel they are not kept clean, very disorganized, and nothing more than a selling atmosphere. So to have canceled my membership when I did meant I dodged a bullet since my membership wouldn't be transferred to L.A.

Oddly enough this affected me. I planned on returning to Cardinal as a member should things go badly at the gym I work for, but I can't do that anymore. Additionally, this is the gym I joined after college and got to know everyone there. So while I am devolving to blathering, I just need to say that I will miss this place.