This weekend in Los Angeles, they are shutting down the 405 freeway. One of the busiest freeways in the world. Which is about 3 blocks from where I live. As I type, I can hear the helicopters overhead. Presumably news people looking to cover this potential fiasco.
Overhearing conversations, I think most people are making too big a deal out of it. I guess, that is, unless you work on weekends.
I've been thinking about the first years I came out to Los Angeles. I remember how lean my life was. I lived in a dingy one bedroom apartment with my friend Ed, who came out here with me. We swapped who would sleep in the living room. And we collected cans to buy ourselves a pizza. Which would last us the week. Those were some LEAN years. I miss it. One thing that I never did give up though. My gym membership.
I signed up in Hollywood in 1999. I remember paying an entrance fee of $300 and it was $30/month thereafter. The place was a hole. Hollywood was danky at the time. They hadn't rebuilt Hollywood & Highland yet and I lived next to a free clinic. It was a daily parade of characters. But I loved it. I joked that we were so low, we had to look up to look down.
I was going to graduate school at the time. So most of my time was spent on campus. It was more or less a necessity since film production classes required almost a 20 hour a day commitment. A lot of it, learning to work on set. Time flies when you're miserable and hungry.
The gym I went to eventually rebuilt itself into a very nice place. It has a full food place. You can get smoothies, a sandwich and drinks. The equipment is top notch. And the locker rooms are fairly clean. There's a lap pool now and some contrast baths. It's not the same place I remember. I remember, more or less, a garage. The gym was also extremely close to me, so I had no excuses BUT to go. If it was going to rip into my booze and food budget, it had to be worth it.
When I signed up, they gave me a personal trainer. She was really awesome. But she didn't really offer me anything different in terms of how I should work out. I think looking back, she seemed to think that most people there already know what they have to do, so they don't press their trainers to push them harder. I have to admit...there wasn't much she was going to tell me either.
I think now, when we introduce people to our workouts, I'd like to preface a lot of it with...this isn't a personal trainer's type of workout. These are the field and this is work. Can you imagine a plantation worker asking the field boss what they should do with a hoe?
Sure, there are a lot of elements of every man for himself, but we also don't leave people behind. I like to think our guide is to inspire us to get better. We suffer together and we win big together.
Try this next time...modify and combine your workouts. For instance, instead of doing dumbbells curls, why not curl, shoulder press and squat. That full range of motion triggers your whole body into balance. Rather than building just your bicep. And anyway, having large arms with small shoulders and chicken legs looks like a cartoon. When I do a pushup now, I just don't do a push up, but I roll onto the ground and lift myself up again into a pushup position. It just targets every part of your body to work properly.
I honestly didn't see results until I got out of the gym. I spend less time there now. It's because the workouts we do seem to fit exactly to shredding all that excess fat but also, maintaining some muscle tone. I'm almost to my goal of 150lbs. And I feel more balanced. I feel my core still needs some work, but we'll get there. If I can dig my way out of a Hollywood cave, then this should be just another day at the park.
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