THE group exercises (GX) at the gym are now daily from Monday to Sunday. They used to be on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday or three times a week.
I’ve been joining GXs since February 2024, to test my, hmmm, muscles I guess. The GX can be a gauge of progress at the gym. If before, I couldn’t do the dumbbell plank weight drag through, now I can—ahem, puera buyag—and that’s with a five-kilogram dumbbell.
And then, there’s plank with a row, still using five-kilogram dumbbells. And there’s the mountain climber, Spider-Man plank, plank with shoulder tap, side plank on forearm, reverse plank, forearm to full plank, plank jack, and the good old forearm plank.
While watching gym classmates who joined Coach Jowen Racines’s Boot Camp GX in February 2024, the only expression on my face was awe. Awed by what they could do. Boot Camp is the hardest GX at the gym.
A week later, I joined that but with modifications for me.
Like a diet, exercise is also to each their own. There are exercisers who prefer walking, jogging, and running. Others would rather do yoga, Pilates, and ballet. And there’s the gym enthusiast who can do everything—he walks, jogs, runs, joins yoga, Pilates, and ballet classes, does all kinds of exercises that the gym offers including Zumba, GX, boxing, and personal training.
But here’s one important tip: there’s no contest. Whatever the exerciser can do, kung saan siya masaya, let him be. But it’s wise for him to learn that weight loss is 80-percent diet and 20-percent exercise. It can even be 99.9-percent diet and .1-percent exercise. But believing the latter might discourage people from exercising, so, better revert back to the 80/20 rule.
People do tend to tell the exerciser who has already lost weight to please stop dieting and exercising already. Oh, what does that mean exactly? If he stops, he will be fat and will experience again all the side effects of being fat.
For me, no diet and no exercise mean I’ll be 180 pounds again. That was my heaviest. Or that’s what I know as my heaviest since I was afraid to step on a weighing scale after that. My “normal” weight then was 150 to 160 pounds. I’d walk around malls using FitFlops and always felt like I was about to tip over.
I lost 25 pounds with the no-red-meat diet in 2021, and lost an additional 25 pounds through the low-carb diet in 2022. I’m now maintaining my weight through the carnivore diet.
It has been almost three years of going from low-carb to carnivore, with several high-carb indulgences in between. Halo-halo and cheesecake, anyone? As long as they’re worth the carbs, go ahead, indulge. By the way, Coach Jowen, through his “The Sweet Coach,” makes the most delish Basque cheesecake and banana cheesecake.
And it has been almost a year at the gym. That’s our happy place, so, don’t wonder if some gym classmates go there twice a day, or even on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. And with a group exercise—Head Coach Ralp’s Boot Camp—on Sunday, plus the fact that the gym is open 24/7, hmmm, goodbye, rest day.
