Middle-Aged Musings

How Can They Know? By Teresa Pesce.

Youth doesn’t understand what it’s like to feel older. And why should they understand the encroaching limits of age? Well, in some cases, it would be nice. Case in point: youthful fitness trainers. Young and muscular, able to run like a deer inspired by spring and enjoy extreme sports without a second thought, they don’t get breathless on a staircase, have to clutch nearby gym equipment for support to stand up after a knee bend, or perform embarrassing contortions to get up from the floor. When you’re older and out of shape and have hired a trainer to correct your out-of-shapeness, you somehow have to communicate to this living statue of physical perfection that you would love to hold that 30 lb. weight and do a deep knee bend, but you can’t do the deep knee bend even WITHOUT the 30 lb. weight! Can we start with just doing a knee FLEX?

I watched one young Olympian instruct a gentleman in his early 70s to sort of stride-leap from one plastic disc to another around the room. At first, the man did fairly well, but soon he was beet-red, chest heaving, wobbling dangerously as he landed each time, as the trainer gazed fondly at him and let him keep going. I had my cell phone dialed one digit short of 9-1-1, just in case.

Tinkerbell sparkled into life at the touch of a Disney paintbrush and has always been a size two! Today, she lives in gyms and fitness centers in the form of beautiful young fitness trainers who think five pounds is a serious weight gain. Being significantly overweight is an entirely foreign experience to many of them. They don’t know how it feels to move when you’re heavy. When they stand, they simply use their legs. They don’t need the trick of pushing on the chair arms to launch yourself out of your seat. It’s the same with getting up from the exercise mat. They practically levitate up, while we have to use our arms and our legs to get off the floor, and then straighten our legs while bending over, and then straighten up from the waist.

These petite perfections don’t know the simple act of rolling over in bed can involve thrashing like a beached manatee if you’re maneuvering enough extra pounds. So with the best of intentions, these twinkly Tinkerbells lead the out-of-shape and overweight in exercises, cheering “Woo-hoo!” and sprinkling “Good job’s” like fairy dust, with absolutely no idea of what their client is experiencing. Even if these perfect beings all wore “fat suits” for a week, it wouldn’t help because the suits don’t contain the weight dragging us down constantly. They can’t know the fatigue, the clumsiness, the embarrassment. So we must break it to them gently that their three sets of twelve must be two sets of three, walking equals jogging, and what goes down will probably not come up without help. How else can they know? So speak up! When you catch your breath, that is.

#health