I have been attending the Athletic Centre weight room for three of my four years here at the U of G, and as I depart from this campus come mid-April, I must confess that I love our weight room.
You can spot (pardon the pun) me in the squat rack at roughly 8:30 a.m. during the week, so I’ll admit that my love for our weight room isn’t tainted by the over-crowdedness that the afternoon crowd is privy to.
While the aesthetics of the gym haven’t improved much over the years – or for that matter, decades – there is a noticeable difference about the demographics of the weight room this year – women are everywhere!
It is not rare to show up at the gym early in the morning and be outnumbered by them in the weight room. The advocacy of the fitness industry for women to get into the weight room is finally producing results, and everyone is recognizing the benefits of the squat, dead lift, bench press, and military press.
So as women begin to see what the weight room can do for their body that a treadmill can’t, I decided it was high time I entered a domain typically dominated by women, so I could realize the benefits that yoga can bring to my body that 10 minutes of post-workout stretching cannot.
I got in contact with Emma Tait, manager at Tranquil Yoga, and asked, for the sake of experiment, if I could attend a beginner’s yoga class.
Up until this point, my only experience with yoga was two and a half years ago, when I did all three months of Tony Horton’s P90X.
The setting sun dimly lit the spacious studio and the pencil-thin hardwood flooring made the room glow a golden yellow. It was calming and welcoming and everything I had expected a yoga studio to feel like.
I rolled out my yoga mat, and myself and the nine women present made a semicircle around Tait; I was given a block to help me hold poses that required greater degrees of flexibility for good measure.
I downward-dogged, I child posed, I did the warrior one, two, and three – admittedly shaking quite uncontrollably at times – and I used the mental fortitude I learned lifting weights to focus on my breathing. I went the full hour and even refrained from using the block as a support.
My back, which lives perpetually between varying degrees of tight and really, really tight, was as loose as it had been in a long time, and that looseness lasted for days. The breathing calmed my entire body and mind, and I found that when I was in the gym the next day, I was more focused and pain free, which translated into heavier lifts.
Stigmas exist in the weight room and the yoga studio, but my experience proved to me that, while breaking these stigmas may be nerve wracking at times, they have benefits which far outweigh the anxiety of the imaginary glaring eyes we all see when we are in uncomfortable situations.