As I sit here writing this, almost every muscle in my body has been letting me know it exists. Except for my calves, each muscle was heavily used this morning. For a guy who just turned 66 it is a great feeling. Heck, for a guy at any age it would be a great feeling.
More interesting, at least to me, is how I got my muscles to speak this loudly. Louder than they used to scream in the early 00s when I was still doing Masters Swimming. I am excited that I feel this way now. The fact that I was able to generate this muscular cacophony while barefoot and in the privacy of my home during a pandemic is just icing on the cake.
I have always loved to exercise. Yeah, I’m a freak that way. Since I was 19, some 47 or so years ago, I have consistently worked out. During that timespan two themes emerged: I love cardio, and I hate weights, so much so that I avoided lifting them for most of those years. And if I did lift them, I just faked my way through a few meaningless sets.
But no amount of cardio would leave me feeling like this. It takes weights, the very things I profess to hate to lift. Huh? What about my life script? What changed?
My workout this morning consisted of exercises that require lower body pulling. Seven months ago, before I got my Tonal, I would not have understood what those words meant. Now, I do. They mean doing exercises that are centered around using the backs of my legs and my glutes to straighten my body. Exercises like deadlifts, or dreadlifts, as I used to think of them. My work out this morning was riddled with them.
For people who have worked out with private trainers this may not be a big deal. For me it was mind boggling. I mean, until I got Tonal, I had not done deadlifts since I was a High School Sophomore, and I probably did them wrong then. I would have never done them at Equinox. They represented everything I was afraid of while weight lifting. They required technique, lots of technique. They were the epitome of scary. Just the thought of doing them could cause an injury. Just trying them could leave me a twitch away from locking my back up for life. Or so I thought.
Yet I did a whole bunch of them today. My muscles are singing with fatigue, and I am brimming with excitement about it. WTF? How could I find myself in this position? The answer is simple: Tonal.
The rest of my family and most of my closest friends are pretty much sick of me Tonal talking. I do it so often that it has become ridiculous, if not downright obnoxious. No doubt about it. But that is okay, at least for me.
I just completed day 19 of a 31 day group program orchestrated by Coach Liz, one of the cadre of amazingly good coaches at Tonal. My sister, Arlene, who resides in Northern California, is doing it with me. It makes it more fun. But it is the program and support that provides the framework and the majority of the fun. I am surprised as I think to myself, “I am so happy I will have the opportunity to redo this workout one more time before the program ends.”
Shockingly, in seven short months I have re-written my exercise life script and now focus on weights over cardio. Talk about an old dog and a new trick. It’s just not supposed to happen. Yet it did.
I did not expect this when Tonal showed up and was attached to the wall in our spare bedroom. My plan was to use it to enable me to cut the cord to Equinox and do a modicum of weight lifting at home. All the while I thought I would keep faking my way through weight lifting exercises in between the days I ran. Boy, was I wrong.
The device is spectacular in form and function. I can do a practically unlimited series of movements, working out just about every muscle in my body. What’s more interesting, though, is that Tonal brings technology to weight lifting. It uses digital weights, which make free weights look like buggy whips did during the dawn of the age of the auto. It has modes that enable it to alter the resistance at various points in the movement. It also measures everything I do. It captures the weight I lift, the range of motion I use and the power I apply to each rep. It create graphs of all this in real time. It also remembers everything, letting me know, somewhat sporadically, if I have achieved a personal best in one or more of those categories. I am slowly getting into all this data as I get more into lifting.
Tonal’s capabilities are somewhat mind boggling, but more important, at least to me, was the knowledge, coaching and community that came with it That is what provided me with the support, motivation and education I needed to embrace lifting weights and to learn how to do it properly. That was the key to taking the dread out of my dreadlift, to unlocking the deadlifter that still resided within me. The deadlifter I had no idea was there.