Falling is fun!

All the motivational posters talk about falling and getting back up and it's not about how many times you get knocked down but how many times you stand back up. That's not the falling I'm talking about. I mean actually falling.

Not falling where you hurt yourself, but falling and laughing. Khris says I fall gracefully. In slow motion. Somehow deliberately. I haven't fallen in a while. I usually fall from lunges, but today I fell from pull-ups.

I do pull-ups with one foot in a gigantic rubber band. And when I get out, the leg in the band likes to fling forward. I don't know exactly what happened today, but as Khris was trying to unband me, I just knew I was going down. I said, I'm going to fall. He said, no you're not. (I think he thought I was unsure of myself, but if I actually speak up about something, I'm pretty certain.)

I said, yes, I am, as I went down in slow motion and somehow grabbed the band to slow myself as I did a nice crooked leg and then butt land on the floor with my arms in the air holding the band to get my points for sticking the landing!

Falling is fun! I like falling! It means I'm in the moment. I'm not being tentative. I'm not thinking about what's going on around me. I'm trying my best. I don't care what I look like.

What I look like was a topic that came up today in other ways. A lady walked by us and stopped Khris and told him how he has been doing such a good job with me and that I've lost so much weight.

Khris and I talked about some things dealing with body and how he pays attention to what you can do, not your weight. Your weight is your responsibility. He pays attention to if you're able to do exercises better or your form is improving, if you can lift heavier weights and things like that.

He pays attention; that's certain! I did 10 straight-leg lifts on the standing apparatus and I must have made a grunt on the first one and he asked what that was about. I told him my back just hurt.

He asked more questions and determined that my back was probably hurting lately from the pressure of the situps and leg lifts on the floor and said we'd do planks and other core work instead of sit ups and leg lifts. He even had me do extra stretches for my back.

We also talked about the waist band on my pants that might press into the floor and bruise my back. During our conversation he told me something I thought was very interesting. As we talked about different clothes for the gym, he told me how he used to make some girls do burpees if they fixed or adjusted their shirts all the time during the their workouts.

He told them they were coming to the gym to work on themselves and they were already self-conscious every time they walked outside about how people might be looking at them. In the gym they were not going to worry about people looking at them. If their shirt hiked up because they were doing an exercise, that's what happens. He was going to punish them for paying attention to that and letting that affect them.

I liked that. The gym should be a place to be free. Everyone is there to become their better selves and should be respected for that. It's not a competition, it's a support system. It's a place where it should be fun to fall!