IAN KARMEL’S BOOMER GYM ALERT

via portlandmonthlymag.com

Based On Ian Karmel And Everything As F##k: A Warning Voice From His Generation To Boomers.

Too many fitness fanatics urge us to better health. And we ignore them.

You can’t ignore Ian Karmel. The Portland comedian and Portland Mercury columnist writes about his gym experience, the same gym experience boomers have been dodging.

What happens when you go to a boomer gym? How can you tell it’s even a boomer gym?

Look for lots of slow riders on the bikes, aimless talking, wandering around confused.

Ian clears it up. It’s a gym. You do gym things at a gym. Ian takes it from here.

So I’ve finally started going to the gym. Well, that’s not true, I’ve always kind of gone to the gym.

The old guys in the gym say the same thing. The gym is your friend if you take the time. Friends are like that. If you have the time, you’ll find a friend.

You could do worse than a gym, but if its a bad friend, make it an enemy, and pound the gym.

– In the way where you go three to four times a week and you buy a menagerie of superfoods and you meander through the juicers at the store and wonder aloud how one could possibly be five times as expensive as the others, and then you eat a sandwich so good that you stop going to the gym for a few months and then you start up the cycle again.

The opposite of muscle memory is ‘eat like a hog’ memory and it’s something everyone ought to go through, briefly. No more than twenty years max.

By then a big guy on the sit-up rack with no trainer looks like he might squeeze a few years back in the bottle with One. More. Crunch. It’s painful to see.

Eat a sandwich, pizza, a cheesesteak, handfuls of hamburgers, gobs of gluten, and that’s it.

-Now, though, I’m serious. I’ve got a personal trainer. I’ve talked to a nutritionist.

This is the part that caught my attention: “talked to a nutritionist.”

Learning food stuff is first step to that six-pack. It’s all about the six-pack, or four-pack, or two-pack. Okay, it’s about hoping there’s something in there adding up.

– I’m in it, and this shit is kind of weird. Personal trainers are interesting people. You know, I grew up one of Beaverton, Oregon’s greatest (syke!) high school football players (true)—so I’ve spent time in gyms, but never with a personal trainer.

How do you not like this; taking memory lane back to Beaverton high school football.

Every high school football player in the gym goes there eventually, whether they played in 1954 or 1994.

It’s the old time college players that get me. 70 and 80 year olds talking football. They make it sound easy. It couldn’t have been easy.

– I always just saw them off in the distance, being too muscular for their own good. You know the type I’m typing about—their muscles seem to be fucking up their lives, like they’re TOO buff (I tell myself.)

When you start out, everyone looks too buff. I asked one of them, not a trainer but a muscled-up guy. He looked me over and told me what ‘supplements’ I’d need to stack, the schedule, and when to cycle off.

If there’s such a thing as TOO buff it’s where you see muscle size and veins sticking out like little octopi.

You can have both but you might turn your grapes into raisins doing it.

– They walk around all deliberately with their arms cocked up like they’re covered in sleeping bees and they’re trying not to wake them.

After you cross the line on the dip bar to strapping on a weight belt with a chain holding two dumb bells hanging between your legs like Ironman’s testicles, your arms stay cocked because you’re so damn strong body weight isn’t enough.

Watching strong guys do dips with an extra hundred pounds strapped to them is always a treat.

– They’re severely stoked and positive about the mundane. Personal trainers are part of a ludicrous juxtaposition, standing there like a big doofus potential-energy-and-meat salad while some old woman in khaki pants attempts to use a shoulder press for the first time in her 80 years on the planet.

People in their eighties drain the life out of anyone less than forty like a vitality magnet.

I see a guy training the weekly senior fitness classes aging before my eyes. The trainer for water aerobics, called water aerobics because Water Classes For Men And Women Too Crippled Or Large To Do Anything Else is too long, is wearing down.

Good trainers keep themselves in peak condition to fight off the energy pirates, er, clients; the others find different work, or turn into severely stoked, arm cocked, intimidaters.

– I know personal trainers help people work out, but they always make people seem less fit by providing an instant comparison for JUST HOW OUT OF SHAPE the people they’re training really are.

There’s the fifty five year old man jumping up on a stool and barely keeping his balance time after time.

A forty year old sleep apnea woman lays down on the bench, can’t breath, rolls off.

Give trainers full health disclosure. If you don’t have any health issues, make one up. They’ll focus right on it.

– Now I’m that person they’re training, and I can report they also make you appear out of shape in person, not just from across the room, but it’s slowly getting better.

The chit chat between trainers with long time clients and new clients runs from challenging the new guys capacity to do what he’s told, to reminding the long-term client on form.

The time between new and long-term is about as long as the first contract. The second round makes you a veteran.

– The nutritionist has been even more helpful, perhaps, than the personal trainer.

A nutritionist talks their talk like a seasoned emergency medical technician talks theirs. Both will save your life.

One shows you a road to fitness that doesn’t include a cardiac detour; the EMT teaches CPR in case you find someone on that detour.

– I learned one clutch thing right off the bat from the nutritionist: A taco salad is not a salad at all. It’s simply a gigantic taco. That’s the kind of evil-ass information you can’t unlearn. They just put “salad” in the name and we’re all supposed to act like it’s healthy, but naw.

I kind of like this idea. A BBQ pork rib salad? Pizza salad? Beer salad?

– Another thing I learned is that an ice cream salad isn’t even a real thing. It’s just something I made up. I’m the only one who thinks it’s a real thing (it’s a bunch of green gummy bears in a big bowl of vanilla ice cream, by the way).

Ice Cream Salad a made up thing by Ian Karmel, or a new store in a Whole Foods or New Seasons anchor strip mall?

The point of all this is, it’s been a few months and it’s been worth it. Paying someone to hold me accountable is actually working. If you’re thinking about doing it, FUCKING DO IT. You can’t keep circling the juicers forever.

If you don’t know Ian Karmel, you do now. And you should. Beaverton High School? Portland State? Hollywood?

Does it get more Portland than that?

And he hits on fitness. Did John Candy every talk fitness or gym? Did John Belushi? Chris Farley?

We’ve got a winner in Ian. He’ll be in for the long haul now.

via idealmedia.com