Exercise, Shmexercise

I am not a fan of the gym.  So if you are trying to lose weight and get healthy, what do you do if you hate the gym?  You find alternatives.

Once I accepted the fact that I was going to have to exercise, I started looking for some options that I would enjoy.  I started with bike riding on the weekends and on an occasional week night but then it turned cold and one of my riding buddies got sick.  I didn’t want to do it alone.  I did some self-evaluation and realized that I need social interaction when I exercise.  That way I focus on the social part and forget about the fact that I am working out.  

I moved on to the Wii Fit Plus.  It allows you to set a calorie burn goal and tells you how you are doing along the way.  It was fun and it worked.  But I needed more than the interaction of a digital trainer that asked me if I had breakfast and told me my left leg was weaker than my right.

I read an article in Southern Living magazine about Sunny Becks Crumpton of Hooprama in Nashville.  She teaches hoop dancing for fitness.  Using a weighted hula hoop, you learn to move and “dance” with the hoop.  I found a local teacher, Charity of Hoopbug.com, and joined her class at BAPA in Knoxville.  It was fun and harder than I thought.  I started with one 6 week series on Sunday nights and will begin my next series of classes tonight.

I liked the group and dance part of this form of exercise so I started looking into the other classes offered at BAPA.  There was belly dancing, yoga, ballet, flamenco, hip hop, and some other stuff I had not heard of.  I decided to try Sizemology which is designed for all sizes of women but primarily larger women.  It mixes Jazz and Hip Hop and you learn different choreography each week. I also tried Zumba, a mixture of Latin dance and Aerobics.  And as soon as Anna of Sizemology added a second class, I signed up for that too. Today’s picture is a demo we did during The Healthy Living Expo.  It was snowing really bad and Anna and I were the only Sizemology dancers that could get there.  But we rocked!  Well, she did anyway.

I love the interaction in the classes, the dance part of it, and the all around fun of it.  I burn a lot more calories doing this than I do on a treadmill at the gym and I love it.  And I am exercising more than I would in the gym.  I do an hour on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and an hour and a half on Saturday.  And I still do my Wii Fit occasionally. This morning it was 30 minutes of yoga, strength, cardio and balance activities.

So don’t let the gym stop you.  And if you love the gym, go for it.  The point is to find something you love to do and JUST DO IT.