FitWall

Oh the things I find myself doing…

So one of my teammates is a FitWall instructor, and the studio is also one of my cycling team’s sponsors, so in turn we have little team workout sessions at FitWall-The Studio here in Cheyenne.  Matt went last week and was raving about how I had to try it, though he said I would probably hate it and wouldn’t do well.  Challenge accepted!

FitWall is a vertical training system that engages our body’s “fight or flight” system (sympathetic nervous system for all you science nerds like me!  Which lead me to think about how I won’t wanna eat or pee while I’m doing it…).  By engaging the fight or flight, you engage a whole heck of a lot more muscles than your typical on the ground/sitting work out.  Also, your joints are decompressed while on the wall, which reduces the change of injury.  Pretty interesting stuff!

My main hesitation were about my knees.  I baby the crap out of my right knee, and all it’s suppose to do in life is pedal a bicycle happily.  I’ve decided to call it my Princess Knee, as I treat it like a spoiled princess.  Makes the left knee not so happy, but that’s how life works.  I whined about this to Matt, and he pretty much told me to suck it up and just go.  Ok…

A FitWall workout takes about 30 minutes, and since you’re engaging more muscles at once, you get way more of a workout in 30 minutes than you would in the gym in 30 minutes.  Even better!

So how did it go for me?  It was a sweaty, finger numbing good ol’ time!  Holy crap did that 30 minutes work up a sweat, and get my heart rate up!  Even better is only one or two of the exercises made Princess Knee angry, so my fears of hurting my knee were unfounded and I found ways to work around any discomfort.  I think I did discover new muscles in my body that I didn’t know I had.  11 minutes in, and my fingers were protesting having to get back on the wall, but I fought through it.  I really enjoyed some of the leg exercises, then again, any time I can point my toes and pretend I’m a pretty, graceful ballerina in my head is a good thing!  We ended with using bungee rubber rope cord thingies and doing some ab exercises, which was a nice cool down.  Thankfully I have decent abs naturally!

Now the big test was to see how sore I would be.  I woke up this morning pleasantly surprised!  I had that slight “I worked out, I’m sore, and it feels oh so good” soreness in my shoulders, arms, and calfs.  The only part of me that doesn’t seem to be working right are my fingers, and I fumbled around with the toothbrush a bit.  Fine motor skills are a bit off, but no T-Rex arms.  Not too bad for spending nearly 30 minutes hanging from my fingertips!  Actually made me excited to go do more, which is weird because I have a strong aversion to any sort of exercise outside of riding a bike and the occasional hike/walk.

So there, I tried a workout program, and surprisingly it went well and I see myself going back!  Unfortunately work will dictate how often I can go, but I definitely can see myself adding FitWall in between all the bike riding and couch sitting I do!  Maybe it’ll grow my little puny baby arms into something, right?  🙂