What happened when I joined a kickboxing studio

"Have you seen results?" my friend asked me when I ran into her in the Walmart parking lot.

I imagine she wanted to know if I'd lost weight, because that is how most people judge fitness. The scale. That dreaded scale! But there's so much more to fitness than just numbers: calories, macros, pounds, grams of protein, ounces of water. All the tracking, all the supplements.

True, because of the inBody scale at the fitness shop next to my kickboxing studio, I knew I had lost fat and gained some muscle so that made me happy, even though the net loss -- for all the face-value numbers people -- didn't seem like a big deal.

Most important to me was the amount of visceral fat I'd been carrying decreased. That is my KPI: the abdominal fat. Waistline fat is so unhealthy. I could just imagine it strangling my internal organs, suffocating them. I told my one-on-one coach the night I joined the studio that I had to do "something" because it was a matter of life and death.

I had only just turned 51. It might not have been the getting-hit-by-a-bus-while-crossing-the-street life and-death, but it was the long, sloooooooow, miserable decline-in-health, losing-quality-of-life resulting from heart disease, high blood pressure, and adult onset diabetes on your way to the grave life-and-death. This I envisioned was like sinking in quicksand: you might not realize you’re in too deep until it’s too late. No, thank you to all of that.

Also, no thank you to

• Just giving up because I've reached a certain age, and "Why can't you just accept it?" 
• "You look pretty good for a mom of three kids." (Because I want to look "pretty good" period. No qualifier.)

More than weight loss or appearance

The invisible benefits of working out are my strength and flexibility, positive mindset, and a supportive fitness community. 

There are little day-to-day things I can do now that I couldn't do before like look over my shoulder when backing down the driveway, carry heavy things (like the case of water I was holding when I ran into my friend at Walmart), and squat to look at things on a bottom shelf or cabinet.

Additionally, things don't stress me out as much as they might.

• Dirty dishes in sink Jab cross!
• Socks in the couch cushions Left uppercut!
• Bad day at the office Right roundhouse!

It's way more fun to work out with other people with encouraging coaches. I am definitely not motivated to work out on my own. There has never been a day I left the kickboxing studio and regretted it. I schedule my day around kickboxing as much as possible. I still have hockey evals, baseball tryouts, college tours or admitted students days, in addition to a job and a household to run, but now I make the investment in myself to get to class as often as I can. It's not just about aesthetics; I'm cross-training for my sport, too...

 

...because here's the big thing: I started playing roller derby. (Yes, at my age.) This will be another whole story, but I figured why not? Kickboxing itself was big step outside of my comfort zone, and because of that, I feel like I can do almost anything. It is the first time I’ve been on a sports team since college. For years, I have been a fan for my kids and my husband (they all play organized sports). Now I have something for myself. Even though I have worked out on and off over the years, I wouldn't have considered myself a real athlete. Now I do.

That day in the Walmart parking lot, I told my friend, "Yeah, I've lost some weight but there's just so much more..."