GymPug

Back day again.

There’s nothing quite as terrifying as the youthful, exuberant slave-driver you have temporarily placed in charge of your body declaring that they have “made an exercise up”. It’s pant-shittingly scary. Trust me when I say that you madly start wracking your brain in search of a legislative escape route. Some sort of EU regulation? A council edict? Doesn’t a new exercise have to win a competition first after being judged by a panel in a strange Studly Beefcake version of Britain’s Got Talent? Surely there has to be an independent scientific study? 

Apparently, nope, if you are a card-carrying Personal Trainer you can just fucking freestyle it like the mad, meat-packed genius you are.

In this case, the exercise involved a big heavy metal stick being used as a paddle. For those adventurists amongst you who like to cocktail their extreme sports: It’s as if you mixed Kayaking... with the inexorable sensation that you are unscrewing the entire top half of your body like the lid of an expensive pen.

This seemed particularly unfair of the Pepster given that I had only just beaten all previous records set during the last time we played his little challenge of ‘how insane can the amounts of weight I put on for GymPug to shrug pink-necked and vascularly whilst nudging his own balls with the bar’ (we are now up to a staggeringly painful 150kg). The final effect, after rinsing both back and abdominals until I cried and tapped out mid-exercise whilst making little sickly pigeon noises in the back of throat, was that on exiting the gym I felt the entire top half of my body, as an entity, separate from my lower half. I wobbled out into the sun; a warped, weak, rust-springed Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout.

Sitting down briefly on the way home (less a moment of contemplation, more a beleaguered attempt to knit my two halves back together), I bemoaned the lack of a decent meme to status-update with. All the wobbly-leg gifs in the world, but try and find a decent picture of a post-gym Slinky the Dog, and you’re barking up the wrong tree.

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As a side-note, if you intend on doing this gym / weight malarkey yourself, I recommend getting some sort of belt to brace your back. Peppy provided me with his - I imagine without it my spine would have zigzagged into my hips like a cheap concertina.

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Sick in a Bin: A Retrospect

This actually occurred a few weeks ago, but I felt it was important to revisit.

You’re never really the same after you’re sick in a bin. There is a vestigial innocence that you used to carry around with you like an old, loved moth-eaten scarf that your Nan bought you. And now that you’ve been sick in a bin, it’s nowhere to be found.

Of course, I had been sick in a bin before. I must have done - I was a drink-addled youth once, wearing crap trainers and listening to shit music and being sick in bins - but the drink had bleached the memory clean, or the sick had not been bin-specific, or no-one had been around to witness it. Or I just hadn’t given two shits because I was a moody self-absorbed teenage fuckmuppet.

So the moth-eaten scarf of my vestigial innocence had remained somehow, until the first time that I was assaulted with the full spectrum of abdominal exercises that Peppy had to offer. The jostling and jumping, the calling into action of strange hitherto-unknown muscle groups, took my stomach by surprise. Inevitably, ignorantly, it blamed the breakfast I’d just eaten.

“Fuck this!” it cried anthropomorphically.

“If I’d have known all of you eggs were going to start kicking off, I wouldn’t have invited you in. Go on, fuck off then! And you can take that toast twat with you!”

And so, publicly and violently, I bin-sicked with a force of propulsion not unlike a NASA lift-off sequence. Peppy had kindly removed the bin lid but now stood, camera in hand, grin on face, making sure the Gym’s Instagram could be graced by my crunch-induced upchuck - ‘Look Ma, I’m famous!’

Final Facebook Gym Update: This Monstrosity.

That is a kilo of brown rice with four cans of vegetable soup mixed into it.  By way of a measure of scale, that spoon is not a teaspoon. It is a large serving spoon.

Why, you ask? Because it is demanded of me to ingest 3000 kcalories every day and these calories can't be fun calories like you would find in say, cookie dough ice cream or barbecue pizza. They have to be low-GI, high-gain pulses, grasses and vegetables.

This is my life, welcome to my life, my life tastes like sadness.

(See Hollywood title-writers, anyone can pull that clever shit with numbers, get over yourselves already):

A couple of worrying quotes from Peppy today.

"See Zach, the reason I like training you, is you always give everything you've got. 110%, full effort. I've got other clients that just give up when it's painful, say they can't do it, but pain is just when the training starts, you know?"

Okay, let's unpack this little number.

First, Peppy is clearly about pain in a big way, confirming my previous hypothesis that all personal trainers are closet sadomasochists (Think about it - the two places where the phrase 'Harder! Harder!' is screamed to the tune of Discovery Channel grunts and shrieks? BDSM club... and Gym). Then there's the fact that he has quickly evaluated that I'm someone who can be persuaded to do as they’re told regardless of the excruciating pain involved (damn you, people-pleaser gene!). Lastly, that the persuasion that works best on this eggshell psyche is validation from my peers. Okay, I'll admit, someone joins a gym - somewhat obvious their self-esteem may have taken more hits than an addled starlet. But to be able to use that knowledge as simultaneous cudgel and carrot? The kid's got smarts. We'll leave that there then. On to quote numero dos:

"See these other trainers, just chatting, not getting their clients to push themselves. I'm not like that."

Great. So he's a smart bugger... and the most lethal PT in the entire gym. Which is probably why I now can't lift my arms higher than my waist and am stiff as a board.

Gym update six: I'm back!

No wait, sorry, that came out wrong, I meant: "My back!"

Let me tell you a story of GymPug the Boy. When GymPug the Boy was 5 or 6 years old, he fell off some monkey bars in the playground onto his back and thought he had paralysed himself and that his lungs didn't work any more because his spine had exploded and that he was assuredly going to die. Hypochondria starts young, kids.

Of course GymPug the Boy had only winded himself and after one of the school bullies, an absurdly large girl with pigtails - think of a roided-out Pippi Longstockings, all freckles and unchecked aggression - came over and called him a poof, GymPug the Boy scraped together his tattered, wounded pride and lived to fight another day.

I now feel that exact same spine-shattered dry-heaving hand-me-my-crayolas-i-need-to-write-a-will pain. Only now... It's constant.

I think Peppy may be punishing me for my cheat day yesterday. He sees all now, thanks to Big Broseph's Orwellian Diet Planner, and that Rogan Josh with peshwari naan did not earn me any brownie points.

#4: “Leg Day, or to call it by its true name, 'Jesus H Christ Ow Ow I Can't Feel My Legs Day'. I think Peppy thought I was going to pass out. I think I also thought I was going to pass out at several points, but I do not hold the whip.

Acknowledging my visible distress, he asked me what I'd had for breakfast. I said pasta. He laughed. "No, really. What breakfast did you have?" I assured him I spoke truth, or at least employed rudimentary sign language to that effect between great shuddering gasps that bowed my ribcage outward.

Another laugh, then he explains to me like a patient parent explaining to their child why you can't only eat ice cream for dinner - pasta is the worst possible thing I could have had. But he told me carbohydrates! Ahh, yes, well, pasta is the wrong kind, see. Wrong GMs. Or possibly MGs... My brain is mush now, I can no longer think straight.

Also, I can no longer tie my own shoelaces.”

#4.5: “Update on update: Couldn't walk properly so rather embarrassingly had to make my way back to the flat with a gait somewhere between a trudge and a waddle. I looked, I'm sure, like Donald Duck doing a John Wayne impression.”

#4.75: “Gym update Four and 3/4: Food. Aah, food. The perennial battle raging in this war I was duped into waging on my pale, flabby, enfeebled body.

Eat healthy breakfast, fruit and fibre, eggs, OJ. Go to gym. Exhaust all energy supplies. Eat enough pizza to sate the population of a small central American republic. Repeat ad infinitum.

Look forward to Peppy's diagnosis of my food diary on Monday. I predict a cheerful, yet insistent telling-off.”

#5: “Gym update five, delayed due to an early meeting at work yesterday. First, chest day, so inevitably my tits feel as though I was tasered by a sadist who had a lack of breastfeeding as a child.

Then: The Diagnosis.

I don't eat enough, and what I do eat is wrong. So from here on in, I'm on a plan. I have been happily nudged towards a nightmarishly Orwellian application that tracks my every calorie and reports it back to Peppy. I will submit (the latest in a series of submissions to the will of Puppetmaster Peppy). Of course I will submit, until I am become like a child plagued with multiple food allergies and overbearing parents, my every mouthful a dilemma, trapped in a prison of chicken breasts and nutritional supplements.