ACE-ing the Symposium: How I learned to relax and enjoy muscle fatigue

ACE-ing the Symposium

How I learned to relax and enjoy muscle fatigue

Going to a fitness Symposium is sort of like going to a camp revival meeting, except everyone is gung-ho about fitness. There are usually two official workouts each day, one in the morning before the classes start, and one in the evening after the lectures are done. In the middle of the day, many of the “lectures” are actually hands-on activities that are sort of workout-esque. To put it simply, you can get more exercise in three days than many people in America get in a full year.

A sane and logical person would probably choose to skip the extra workouts and just enjoy the normal level of activity in the classes. However, the people who attend fitness conferences are not really sane people. We are crazy fitness nuts. We can’t get enough. Industry experts bring in their shiny new equipment and construct insane workouts with them to convince you to buy 100 Bosus, or TRXs, or Step 360s. And we go, because we want to take classes with the glitterati of fitness like Shannon Fable, Lawrence Biscontini, Keli Roberts and Dan McDonough (because we are hoping some of their awesomeness will transfer to us like body glitter).

The first time I attended the Symposium by the American Council on Exercise (ACE), I was relatively newly certified. I was 39 years old, and my flawed perception was that the average attendee age was around 19. Upon arrival, I felt a little old and flabby as I compared myself to others. This feeling was only magnified when I participated in the first workout. It was a high-low interval class that combined lots of partnered work with medicine balls and resistance bands. I think we did about 500 lunges and squats. By the next morning, I could hardly move, but that didn’t stop me from doing another group workout that included approximately 583 lunges and squats (each).

Throughout the day, it seemed like every class I did required more lunges and squats, and by the end of that first full day, I could hardly walk upright. By the second morning, I felt like my leg muscles actually squeaked when I walked. But I am a fitness nerd, and here were all these other fitness nerds—so I did the only logical thing. I switched muscle groups. Legs shot? Do the core workouts! Legs and arms non-functional? Focus on the upper body! By the time I left, there was not a muscle group in my body that didn’t feel like it had been soaked in butane and lit on fire.

However, I still totally enjoyed the experience. The physical discomfort only lasted for a few days, but I still remember listening to Jonathan Ross speak for the first time. I strongly related to his stories about how people in his family afflicted by obesity became his internal motivator for a life in fitness. I bought his book, Abs Revealed (If you aren’t familiar, you should definitely check it out: good, common-sense advice about building great abs).

Another presentation I still remember from that first Symposium was about working with kids, a topic close to my heart since I have three children of my own.

I took my Symposium motivation home. I started a "Fit Kids" class, and I wrote many articles about fitness and exercise. Time passed.

Knowing what the Symposium was like and that I intended to go again, I changed up my workout so that the next time, it wouldn’t kill me. When I worked with clients, I incorporated some of the techniques and tools I had learned at ACE (particularly the partner exercises). When I went back the Symposium in May of this year, I was 41, but in better shape than I had been two years prior.

I took my first TRX class with Dan McDonough at ACE West in 2013. The TRX completely destabilizes your body, so it takes bodyweight exercises like planks, pushups, squats and lunges to a whole new level. But on that first day of class, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. In a workout class like that, I am usually so focused on my own struggles (for example, “man, this move is kicking my butt”) that I really don’t have time to look at other people around me.

Dan had us split up into groups of two to work with a partner, mostly so that we could share the Rip and Suspension trainers more effectively. My partner was probably 25, with tattoos running down his arm. We may have stood about the same height, but he probably outweighed me by about 30 lbs—and all of that was chiseled, sculpted, and exactly where it ought to be. Having this young Schwarzenegger as my partner only magnified my sense of “old and beat,” with which I was already struggling. But it’s okay, you know. We all do the best we can.

So we were doing this move in which you put your feet in the handles of the suspension trainer, with your elbows on the floor, like a plank. And then you raise your hips into the air, bend your knees, and pull your knees toward your chest, and then you straighten back out and bring your knees to the right side and the left. This is excellent for every part of your abdominals, but it was an unfamiliar movement at the time, and I was having a hard time controlling it. In other words, I was shaking like an unbalanced washing machine. I had to back the move off and rest.

Lying on my belly on the floor and feeling wrecked, I looked to my right. There was another 20-something body sculptor next to me, looking like he was modeling the movement for the cover of Muscle and Fitness. Just when I felt like I was out of my depth, I turned my head to the left, and I saw a lithe 20-something woman, sweat beading on her bright red face, struggling with a much simpler modification of the move. My heart went out to her, because I realized I wasn’t the only one whose butt McDonough was kicking. This, in fact, was the point: to find your personal limit and push yourself right up next to it. And I realized that my struggling neighbor and I were actually getting a lot more out of this workout than Mr. Muscle and Fitness on the other side of me.

Long story short, McDonough’s workout sold me on the TRX. I now have it at home and I use it two or three days a week. When I took another TRX class with him in October, he kicked my butt once again. But I kept up much better. I don’t think my muscles squeaked as bad, but I have also learned a valuable lesson: hot tub + swimming = fitness conference survival.

I have also learned that the Symposium is only a little bit about working out. Although the surge of energy I felt working out with a bunch of fitness nuts encouraged me to push myself harder than normal, it was never really about me. It was about you—the person working out with me, or taking classes with me, or reading my articles.

Although it is difficult to get rid of the intrinsic need to compete, proving that I am as strong as a 20 year-old athlete is impossible and irrelevant. It just doesn’t matter. What matters—whether it’s at a fitness conference or my Tuesday morning workout—is pushing myself as far as my body can go that day, while encouraging others around me find their own limit, and surprising themselves by blowing right through it.