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Glutes "R" Us

Posted By: Steve Altman on 06/01/2011

Is this look perhaps out of my reach?

I don’t know about you, but I have never given much thought to my glutes.  To the extent I thought about them at all, I thought of them as something to sit on.  Who could have foreseen the day when I would be told that my glutes had shut down—basically, from having sat on them my entire adult life—and that I would need to reawaken them?  Yet that day has come.

As it happens, my glutes are in a condition similar to those astronauts traveling in suspended animation onboard the spaceship Discovery in 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  Like those slumbering space voyagers in their hermetically sealed capsules, my glutes are inert, just lying there, waiting silently to be revived.

How did I find this out?  It has to do with Italy.  I returned from my recent 24-day Italian holiday having woken up to the fact that life in my 60’s could be wonderful, but also fearing that I would miss out on all that wonderfulness if I continued my sedentary lifestyle and grew decrepit.

That word lifestyle doesn’t quite fit either my life or my style.  My deskbound days, my couchbound nights, have given many the impression that I am a wax figure out of Madame Tussaud’s.  Granted, inside my head it’s an unending cavalcade of lively imaginings and surprising associations, but the rest of me just sits there.  Those parts of my body associated with vibrant good health have been on the shelf since—well, since always.

So last week I signed up at a place called Fitness Together and got myself a personal trainer named Martin.  (When I told Ras about this over lunch, his drink came out his nose.)  Martin is a truly gracious and gentle man to have assumed the daunting task of coaching me through three workouts a week.  Allow me, briefly, to outline the nature of the challenge.

This is more like it.

 

Except for the top hat and monacle—and the white gloves—I look uncannily like Mr. Peanut.  I am spindly everywhere but in what fitness buffs call my “core”—meaning my gut.  I am ample through the core, but not in a muscular way.  More in a–shall we say–cookie-dough way.  When I am on all-fours on the workout pad, I remind myself of a dirigible moored to the ground by cables.

So as Martin was running me through my first exercises, getting a sense of my strength and flexibility (two more words that really don’t apply), it was apparent that my glutes were simply declining to participate.   Martin told me that after sitting behind a desk for decades, my glutes had turned off.

In other words, my ass is asleep.

So now Martin and I are working on exercises to wake up my glutes.  I will describe neither my glutes nor the exercises.  On both counts, consider yourself fortunate to be spared.

Meanwhile, before each workout I spend 10 or 12 minutes warming up on the stationary bike, quite a vision huffing away in my baggy shorts, staring at the Rachel Ray Show on the tube.  On the wall beneath the TV is a rack of fitness magazines.  Such as:  Men’s Fitness (“Six-Pack Abs!  Get ripped for the beach!”), Muscle & Fitness (“Shredded in Six Weeks!”) and, for the ladies, Shape (Sexy Abs!  Get ‘em in 15 minutes!”).  I’d never opened a magazine remotely like these before; now they are my New Yorker.  But my favorite—my favorite though I’ve yet to peek inside—is called Glutes.  I kid you not:  There is apparently an entire magazine called Glutes.  Perhaps looking through it will awaken mine.

When I retired last winter, my friend Susan gave me a book called Younger Next Year.  Very cheery, very encouraging, and very focused on a single message:  If you want to live any kind of decent life as you age, you’d better exercise.  A lot.  I complained about this to my friend Skelly, who beat me to retirement by a few years and has stayed very fit and rides a Harley to boot.  ”It seems to me terribly unfair,” I said to Skelly, “that I have to exercise or grow old prematurely.  I didn’t ask for this.  It feels like a government mandate.”  Skelly, who is three years older than me and looks five years younger, said, “That’s the deal, Stevie.  You gotta do it.”  Skelly, who loves to kid me, was not kidding this time.

So, you ask, am I making progress?  I twist around and look down at my glutes and say, “Hello?” 

As of yet, no reply from down there.  I’ll keep you posted.