Desperate Serbwife

An older man...

So it took us long enough, but Mike and I finally found a gym that we like. It opens at 7:30am so Mike can go before work and they have more than one treadmill so I don't have to sit and wait for some beefcake to finish his 20 minute sprint before I can work out (like I used to have to do at my old gym since they only had one machine).

Anyway, this new gym is quite fancy and it seems that the only people who work out there are ex-pats and women that have had way too much plastic surgery (but that's a whole other story). On our first day at the gym, the trainers were intent on getting all our measurements (weight, BMI, heart rates, etc.). We told them that we weren't really interested in all that, we just wanted to work out. So Mike started his warm up on the ski machine and I started stretching. Well, 10 minutes later, it was clear that the trainers had a one track mind and so we were going to have to do all their measurements whether we wanted to or not. Fine, we said, can't hurt. Or so we thought...

So Mike got off his machine and I stopped stretching. The first thing they did is weigh us and do our BMI, and then they asked us our heights - which, of course, being Americans we only know in feet and inches, not in centimeters. So they approximated and we went to measure our resting and working out heart rates.

Well, after taking all our measurements, the plugged them into their little computer and bleep, bleep, they could tell us everything we want to know about the shape we were in - it even gave us an estimate of how old our bodies were based on our level of fitness. It appeared, based on their estimates, that Mike has the body of a 55 year old man and I have the body of a 12 year old. Um, yeah.

Now, if any of you know us, you know that neither one of these estimates can possibly be true (although that didn't stop me from calling Mike "grandpa" for the rest of the day, until I wanted to kiss him, and then, well, that just seemed gross). Anyway, needless to say, Mike was quite down about his results and I was quite happy (thinking that I wouldn't actually need to go to this gym we just paid to join) until we figured out what went wrong. They estimated Mike's height 5 cms too short and mine 2 cms too tall, which would make our weights totally disproportional. They also miscounted Mike's resting heart rate because he had already been working out for 10 minutes when they measured his "resting" rate. So much for their super-modern measurement system - it definitely doesn't work if a couple of stupid Americans are still learning the metric system!

We have since given them correct data and our fitness ages correspond much more closely to our actual ages. But it sure was fun being 12 again for a day, although I don't think Mike enjoyed belonging to the AARP quite as much.

posted by Brooke @ 3:57 PM