December 22nd, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews Balance Exercises on the Bosu Ball

I have terrible equilibrium, as I believe has come up in this space before, in relation to climbing things, crossing stages, and most especially, walking on ice.

But it’s not as if I’m just working my way through winter at a violently whining crawl. I’ve been working on this issue in various ways, most recently since June on the fun and dangerous Bosu Ball!

Wikipedia defines a Bosu Ball as:

an athletic training device consisting of an inflated rubber hemisphere attached to a rigid platform. It is also referred to as the “blue half-ball”, because it looks like a stability ball cut in half. The name is an acronym which stands for “Both Sides Utilized,” (although the BOSU official web site also says it means “Both Sides Up”) a reference to the myriad ways a BOSU ball can be used [1].

Click here to see a picture (yes, that is the best one I could find).

This is a branded product, Bosu, but as far as I can tell there is no generic term. I guess there’s a pretty limited market for half a rubber ball with a standing platform, and the Bosu people have covered it. Good on them, I say.

What do you do with a Bosu? Well, tonnes of stuff according to various websites, but for the amateurs among us, we basically move upper body exercises onto this really tippy platform, which adds an element of core strength (you improve your posture and tighten your abs in an attempt to stay vertical) and lower-body strength (you brace your feet and tighten your quads for similar reasons).

It takes awhile to just get to a comfortable point of standing still on a Bosu. Start out practicing near a wall. Put one hand on the wall and foot fartherest from the wall in the centre of the flat surface. Then put the other foot as close as possible and wiggle the first foot out until they are parallel. Wiggle a bit more until you are balanced, more or less. There. Now take your hand off the wall.

The easiest things to do on a Bosu involve standing still and moving only your arms, something like an Arnold Press. That is where you do a biceps curl with a dumbbell in each hand, and then flip the arms out into a shoulder press, then reverse back to start (see here for a cute little video. And yes, it was named after the Terminator.

Any sort of standing biceps/triceps/shoulder exercise will work on a the Bosu, and you can move on to doing squats, cable pulls, all kinds of strength training stuff.

If you’re me, you have to cut way down on the weight you’re lifting every time you put an exercise onto the Bosu, to compensate for the extreme distraction of potentially falling over and smashing your skull into the very wall you used to pull yourself upright. Every time you do the work-out, though, you gain confidence. It’s really *not* the safest thing in the world, but with a reasonable amount of care (about what you work out around, principally–mats are good, bench-press bars are bad) you can be reasonably assured of finishing the work-out in one piece.

Six month later, I do think I am marginally steadier on ice and land, though six months of indoor exercise cannot erase a life-time of falling phobia. I do appreciate the efficiency of these exercises, since they always hit the aforementioned abs and quads, no matter what you are doing. And Bosu exercises are a novel challenge, keeping me from getting bored with my work-out.

But really, a Bosu costs $45 to $60, is sort of terrifying and you could always just do a lot of Tree Pose. Only get involved if you can try out a ball for free somehow; lots of gyms have them. If you like this sort of possibly-concussion-inducing challenge, maybe then go ahead and spend the dough.

Me, I’m still scared, and I actually don’t try to do this stuff on days I’m feeling headachy or otherwise more off-balance than usual. But I have felt some small gains from it, and it is satisfying to me reasonably steady up there, though also something about it that’s like being a trained bear in a cirucs. And then there was the time I was doing standing cable rows and squats on my Bosu, concentrating *very* hard in order to keep from pitching forward into the weight stack and smashing out all my teeth. A woman strolled past, stopped aghast and exclaimed, “And you’re chewing *gum*!”

All you single ladies.
RR

October 18th, 2007

Morning report

Is it pathetic that one of the most interesting things I do in any given day is go to the gym? There’s just stuff there that I don’t experience at the various desks I inhabit the other 90% of the time. Moving vigorously for one. Also, the sorts of conversations people have there. It’s all chix (note:I go there because it’s nearest and cheapest–I have no major qualms about men seeing me sweat).

I like to watch personal training sessions while I’m working out. I figure I’m not going to pay $50 per hour for clever fitness tips, but I might learn something for free by eavesdropping. You might know that I live in an extremely ritzy neighbourhood–one of the wealthiest ridings in Canada, I read somewhere. I myself live in an average appartment-building on the main thoroughfare, for what I think is a fairly average rent. But go a block north or south, you are into million-dollar houses. It makes for a safe walk home late at night, and a lot of nearby gelato places I cannot afford to get too comfortable in.

So, for many people nearby the fee isn’t prohibitive. The PT clients in the predawn hours seem to divide into two main categories: well-groomed professionals taking “me time” away from family and career to achieve toned upper arms; heavyset middle-agers there on doctors’ orders to stave off heart disease. The trainers, on the other hand, are mainly extremely young, and of course extremely fit. Most are attractive, too, but in a way that suggests that the attractiveness is an accidental byproduct of the fitness, and not the other way around. Their first priority is to be able to scoop up their whole pilates class and carry them to safety, should the studio catch fire…perhaps I exaggerate.

Also, I gather from my eavesdropping that most of the trainers are part-time, either while they are students or as they pursue other less lucrative careers like dance. Thus, there is a conversational chasm that must be bridged to pass the time in an hourlong workout. They pass the weights back and forth and talk about the exercises, but that leaves lots of time left over to talk about real life. As with hairdressers and manicurists, there is a distinct difference between the lives lived by those on the service-provider and service-recipient sides of the equation. Age, class, cash, day-structure, you name it. Like hairdressers, though, the trainers seem more than versed in navigating these difficult conversational waters. They’ll talk on glibly at 6:07 while, say, a bobbed and extremely efficient looking executive type struggles and staggers under the barbel.

It was that pairing that I was listening to today, a tall alpine-looking trainer of twenty-five (she announced this in an earlier anecedote) and the aforementioned 45-ish exec. I’ll reproduce the story here as near as I can to verbatim–you don’t think that’s copyright infringement, do you?

“So I’m at the gym last night, not here, at my own gym, and I’ve got this hour-long run to do. So I’m on the treadmill, and you know how it is when you run, sometimes your intestines get jiggled and joggled around, right? [no sign of assent from the client, who is wobbling and breathing heavily] So I let out this little squeaker of a fart, right? Just small. And the guy next to me, he totally heard it and he gave me the *dirtiest* look. Like, he was just disgusted to hear that from a *girl.* It was totally hilarious, but the thing was none of my roommates were there to laugh with me, and it was so funny. SO funny. *He* didn’t think it was funny though.”

Our lady completed her set and grimly put down the weight. She didn’t think it was funny either. The trainer didn’t notice, and made her get down on the floor in plank position. I waited until I got to the cardio area to laugh.

I swear, that’s all that’s going on today.

Burn and fade so slow
RR

August 31st, 2007

If they were going to abbreviate something, why TGIF?

Isn’t it nice enough to spell out in full? Especially on a day when one has the leisure time to do so.

Mmm, a three-day weekend, haven’t had one of *those* in a while. No, that’s a lie, I had three days off in July, when I went to Ottawa. But travelling, while awesome, is not *relaxing.* This afternoon when I got home, I took a *nap.* I might take another one before bed tonight. We’ll see (there’s good comedy sketch floating around somewhere, about Ronald Regan, featuring a bedtime nap–think it’s on YouTube?)

Actually, tonight after I have digested dinner I’ll probably go the gym. I meant to go for a run in the glorious cool sunshine, but the nap and the dinner made it later, and the long shadows in the ravine at dusk freak me out. Plus the new gym is still new enough to feel fun. For one thing, it’s right around the corner, so I can go late in the evening, go spontaneously, not shower or change after, just lunge home. Gosh, this is boring.

Ok, the really cool thing about the gym is that they have televisions there, and if you bring your own headset you can plug yourself in and choose from 5 or 6 scintillating cable shows.

Now we know that Casa Rose-coloured is tv-free since the unfortunate incident that I actually didn’t witness but that broke my tv somewhere in 2004. And as for cable, it has never been a presence in my life. I grew up in a so-called dead zone (note: not a metaphor) where none of the cable companies are willing to run service. That’s right, “willing”. We used to think that they weren’t *able* for some reason, but it turns out that the population densitiy is just too low to make the initial investment in infrastructure worthwhile. It’s very annoying, but it probably made for a purer childhood.

I’ve almost never, for example, seen music videos. Not even at friends’ houses, as most friends who were close enough to share appliances also lived in the dead zone. We really thought that half an hour of *Video Hits* Sunday afternoons on CBC was as good as it got.

As I got older, I realized how wrong we were–at parties, in hotel rooms, other people’s houses, university residence. And of course, my folks did some sort of satellite fandango the year I moved out and got *everything*. The year I moved out, figures. But it’s hard to make it a priority, you know? So the gym is really my first chance to watch whatever I want (well, Much and some other version of Much) for as long as I want. Which as it turns out, is most of my cardio, which is bad news indeed for the *New Yorker* (hmm, note to self: *New Yorker* not person, cannot be offended nor miss you.)

Oh, and did I mention I go to a “women’s gym” where everyone’s fiftyish and monied and “concentrating” (so why did I choose it? It was the cheapest, strangely.) The only people young and even vaguely hip are the staff, who I guess set the channels. So when the permanent wave ladies stroll past me as I’m chuckling away at My Chemical Romance and those cheerleaders in gasmasks (brilliant–what’s that song called?) it makes me feel vaguely young and hip, too.

Also I’m getting lots of cardio in, which is good.

Also it took me nearly two hours to get from work to the doctor’s office today (it was a half day). BIRT this is not a TTC rant way-station. Hence, perhaps, the need for the nap.

I took a shuttle on the shock wave
RR