Fitness Needn’t Be an Exercise

It’s your first day at the health club and the young Neanderthal behind the front desk tries to suppress a smirk as he watches you come through the door. His body is so rippled with muscles you can almost hear the seams of his tank top straining to contain his pecs.

As you sign in, he leans over the counter and takes a fingerful of your loose underarm and jiggles it lightly, much to the amusement of the svelte, leotard-clad woman beside him.

You press on to the entrance of the workout room. As your stand in the doorway eyeing the dozens of glistening hard bodies working those fabulously feared machines, you are aware that all eyes have turned to your waistline. The machines grind to a halt, and the silence rings in your ears.

Suddenly you wake up in a cold sweat.

You have been having the same nightmare every night since you vowed on New Year’s Eve that this time, for sure, you are going to make up for all the excesses of the holidays. This time you are going to embark on a serious fitness program and really stick to it. This is it. You jiggle your underarm for reassurance.

January is boom time in the fitness industry.

More people sign up at health clubs, buy exercise equipment and enroll in weight loss programs this month than any other time of the year. But if industry estimates are correct, by February, 80% of them have already given up. The industry keeps no statistics on those who make resolutions but never do anything about them.

Welcome to 1990, the year you and a sensible fitness program are joined for life. No torture, no failure, no guilt.

You have stumbled into the decade of the smart workout, a decade ushered in by last year’s good news that taking your dog for a brisk 30-minute walk three times a week can be as beneficial to your long-term health as training for the Ironman Triathlon every day.

The trick is to do it regularly and keep doing it.

If tirades about motivation, self-discipline and “wanting it badly enough” have not worked for you in the past, it is unlikely they will ever work.

The real issue may be what some experts call exercise psychosis, the excuses for not ever getting started--lack of time, self-consciousness about bad bodies, not knowing how to use the equipment, even fear of exercise itself.

According to Louis Welch, president of Anaheim-based LA Fitness, the biggest mistake most people make is confusing motivation to join a health club with motivation to work out. “The hardest 10 minutes of your workout is the 10 minutes it takes you to get inside the club’s doors,” he says. “Once you walk in you see everybody else is working out, you feel like a dope if you don’t work out too.”

Conquering the 10-minute assault only starts the battle. Experts tell us that it takes a minimum of 21 days of consistent repetition to establish a new behavior pattern.

Understanding how to stack the odds in our favor is the first step in making sure those New Year’s resolutions stick for life.

A stare is as strong as an insult, says Rosalyn Laudati, a Newport Beach psychologist who specializes in eating disorders.

“Overweight people, especially women, would rather not go to the gym than face the embarrassment,” she says. “They are willing to shortchange their own health because of their fear of intimidation.”

Change your attitude: Call it “people watching” instead of “staring,” and realize that those stares can be turned around into admiring looks if you give it time. Prepare yourself by understanding that people who have been working out are going to be in better shape than you.

But only for a while.

You may feel more comfortable starting out in a smaller, more intimate gym than in a big noisy facility. Wear loose-fitting outfits that don’t exaggerate what you perceive as your physical shortcomings.

Women who feel self-conscious exercising in front of men can join clubs that have special “women only” sections.

If you don’t know how to use the exercise equipment, ask an instructor to work with you. Your gym membership pays his or her salary. Ask the manager to recommend an instructor who specializes in helping first-timers deal with the double frustration of being out of shape and unknowledgeable.

Aerobic groupies--you know, those sleek creatures who are on a first-name basis with the instructors and who jump higher and pump harder than everyone else--can be pretty intimidating.

Simply avoid them by taking beginner or low-impact classes, or early morning classes when there are fewer around, says Carl Root, who teaches aerobics at Nautilus-Aerobics Plus in Irvine.

“It takes a lot of motivation to go to a 6:30 a.m. class,” he says, “but it has been shown that people who exercise in the morning are more likely to stick with their program. The people who are there in the morning tend to be a more supportive group as well because everyone realizes it takes a certain amount of motivation just to be there.”

“It used to drive me crazy to go to the gym and see everybody in their size 2s with their legs over their head,” admits career consultant Diane Carr of Placentia. “The first time I went to the gym I weighed 192 pounds. Not only did people stare at me, they were downright rude. I felt like a freak. I would go every Monday and then quit. I just hated going.”

Self-consciousness is by no means limited to women.

Robert Hall, a controller who works in Newport Beach, weighed 217 pounds, smoked, and had just recovered from open heart surgery when his boss dragged him to the gym five years ago. “I felt so out of place that without the forceful insistence of my boss I would never have gone back,” Hall says. “The amount I was pushing around on some of those Nautilus machines was so small I was embarrassed. Even the women were doing more weights than me.”

Hall says people stared at him in the beginning, but he wasn’t allowed the luxury of letting it get to him.

“After a while, though, those people began to notice I was losing weight. They congratulated me on my progress and urged me on. That was the best reinforcement I could have had.”

Today, a hard 160 pounds and a nonsmoker, Hall exercises five days a week before work and jogs six days a week. On his own.

Thanks to society’s “instant” conditioning, people become easily discouraged if they don’t see an immediate change in their bodies once they’ve committed themselves to a fitness program.

But there is no way around the fact that it takes time to get in shape. As one wag put it, you can hardly expect to get in shape overnight if it took you years to get out of shape.

“The whole body grinds down if it is not used,” says John Callaghan, a sports psychologist who heads the Sports Studies Program at USC. “Now that you’re going to get it going again you have to start off slowly and very easily.”

Not only will an overly vigorous start make you sore long enough to make you drop out, it may even be harmful.

“More is not necessarily better,” cautions aerobics instructor Root.

“When I hear people say they have taken seven classes in one week, I know they are not going to stick with it. Every time you exercise you are tearing down muscle fiber, and your body needs time to recuperate, so rest is really important. Over the long haul, something has to give with these people, and it’s usually the whole program.”