In Which We Get Fit Or Get Out

Better Living

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Shaun T is 5’ 11’’ and 175 pounds, with kind eyes and an abdomen so muscled it appears segmented by the same factory machine that stamps Hershey’s Milk Chocolate into little rectangles. When he was a freshman in college, Shaun T gained 50 pounds and decided he needed to “pull it together quick.” A handful of years later, here he is, grimacing on camera and leading a team of bionic-looking young fitness professionals through various and sundry kicks, squats, jumps, and mock sporting actions which together constitute Shaun’s “Insanity Workout.”

Summer is a time when bodily exhaustion seems to double. We flop around in the sun, our wrinkled tabloid magazines forgotten underneath deck chairs. We will move, but only until we are in range. Heat and humidity sap ambition before it can even germinate, even as those magazines instruct us toward “bikini bodies.” Isn’t there something morbid, sort of corpse-esque about the phrase “bikini body”?

I have been doing the Insanity workouts with my coworkers in the first-floor lounge of our building. We are resident assistants for a program in which high school students get a premature taste of college life; the kids are in class all day but our position affords us more free time than we ever dreamed possible.

Looking back, I feel like my summers were far busier ten years ago: I swam, I rode my bike “around the block,” I sweated on playgrounds all across my hometown. Now I sleep until noon and munch at the iceberg lettuce of the Internet, poking at my computer with an unmotivated figure. I had no bikini body aspirations when first starting the Insanity workouts – I was very, very bored.

Boredom is a surprising motivator. Apparently Schopenhauer thought of life as a pendulum swinging between boredom and pain, and after a single Insanity session, I found myself firmly on the side of pain. Certainly soreness prevents the act of walking from being boring. It becomes a series of skips and hops and wincing, mincing steps, like an uncool version of that RJD2 video of the guy on crutches.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote about the embarrassing nature of having an excretory system. His Tereza has a “sudden desire to void her bowels…desire to go to the extreme of humiliation, to become only and utterly a body, the body her mother used to say was good for nothing but digesting and excreting.” Tereza on the toilet becomes little more than a lower intestine, full of “infinite grief and loneliness.”

The unbearable lightness of a Grand Basset Griffon Vendéen dog

Lined up in the lounge, all of us engaging in comical mummy kicks that set everything from calves to triceps on fire, I thought about communal exercise in the same way. Doing extreme, insane workouts (as designed by the indefatigable Shaun T, whose DVD’s tagline is “Get Fit or Get Out”) in public will invite others to see your body’s basest functions. There are grunts that suggest sex, cavemen, and caveman sex. There are other funny noises, squeals and heavy breathing. There are veritable Tigris-and-Euphrates sweat rivers coursing down each participating person’s face and body. There is also the embarrassment that comes with having others witness your body fail.

Failure and success – are these the two poles that motivate us to complete workout videos? The full Insanity Workout takes 60 days to complete; completion (purported success) should, according to the Insanity website, result in a “shredded athletic look,” with assumed weight loss and so on. You will probably end up with some semblance of a standard bikini body. But Shaun T’s definition of success in his workout videos has no real deadline. You get the sense he’d rather you do this workout every day for the rest of your life. Moreover, his definition of success is not a corporeal concept.

Success does not happen when your abdominal muscles are visible through your spandex tank top. Not once in the middle of squat jumps or suicide sprints or particularly horrible sets of bicycle kicks does Shaun T encourage his devotees to continue their workout because doing so will ensure beachy attractiveness. “Dig deeper,” commands Shaun T. Not, “Keep going if you want to impress people!” Not “If you stop now, it will be to the detriment of your obliques!” Shaun T says only Dig Deeper. It’s almost metaphysical, but not quite.

“Hey Michele…what does this remind you of?”

Workouts are funny. A shredded, athletic man in a pair of spandex compression pants doling out Zen maxims is funny. Romy and Michele snickering at the fornication-like motions of a spinning class is funny. My friend Margaret calling Zumba (a type of class I have never taken, though glowing reviews abound) “code for replacing your dignity with a firm behind” is funny. People look ridiculous when they’re sweating their faces off.

To become “only and utterly a body” is a sad thing, just as eating disorders are sad, just as tabloid magazines making fun of cellulite-ridden celebrities (They’re Just Like Us!) are sad. No one wants to be only a body. It’s why “insanity” is such a creepy way to describe how my mind dissolves into mushy breakfast cereal somewhere between the thirtieth and thirty-first power jack: it’s the terror of having no mind and all body. But we must remember that while Kundera’s image of Tereza in the throes of existential angst is sad, it is also funny – because she’s on the crapper.

Shaun T

The first three days of Insanity, my muscles were so sore that it was difficult to maneuver up and down stairs, difficult even to lower myself onto my own toilet. The simple task of carrying a twelve-pack of Yuengling up a short hill proved almost Sisyphean. I hobbled around campus, newly aware of physical limitations. Of course, I was cheating: the seventy-year-old man hobbling a few yards ahead of me was walking like that because of advanced age, not because he had spent the previous hour doing what Shaun T told him to do.

We moved along the chain of workouts, from Cardio and Resistance to Cardio and Recovery (even the recovery involves cardio) and beyond. In the middle of Extreme Abs, Shaun T changed from high plank to low plank with the agility of a Big Cat, and I wondered how he ever managed to gain 50 pounds in college in the first place. A fat Shaun T seemed about as possible as a skinny Santa Claus. Then Shaun T instructed me to Dig Deeper. I lost my mind and could no longer consider impossible things.

Molly O'Brien is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

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