Kathy Manweiler – McClatchy Newspapers
Sep 27 2006 12:00AM
WICHITA, Kan. – Did you work out today? No?
Don’t bother racking your brain for an excuse.
If you don’t feel like exercising, just admit it – or get over it. The staff at your gym truly does not want to hear that you can’t work out because your cat stubbed its toe.
That’s only one of many silly excuses that would-be exercisers have given to fitness experts.
“Some people actually come straight out and say, `I’m just lazy’ or `I hate exercise,'” says P.J. Barrett, director of wellness and personal training at the East Branch YMCA.
But others aren’t nearly that direct.
“People will find any excuse that they can if they’re looking for one,” says Colette Gorges, fitness director at Fitness 2000. “They just do. They’ll use anything.”
“It almost does become comical after a while,” Barrett says.
Jessica Tarbell, metro fitness and health director at the Greater Wichita YMCA, hears a lot about the parking lot. People tell her they don’t feel like exercising because they have to park too far away at the gym. God forbid they have to take a few extra steps on their way to a workout.
“It’s like, `I want to park as close as I can to the front door, but when I get in here, I’m going to get on the treadmill and walk five miles,'” Tarbell says.
Sometimes reality television gets in the way of a gym member’s reality.
“People will say, `I have to stay home and watch `Survivor’ or `American Idol,'” Gorges says.
Weather of all types can keep many people away from a workout. Others claim they can’t possibly exercise during holiday seasons, vacations or when the kids are out of school.
Some use a simple case of the sniffles as a reason to stay on the couch.
“You don’t want to work out when you’re truly under the weather, but if it’s just a little cold, you kind of have to ask yourself, `OK, am I really that sick?'” Tarbell says.
“One time a lady told me her garage door wouldn’t come up,” says Wendy Williamson, a senior level trainer at Genesis Health Clubs.
Williamson says people will come up with all kinds of excuses if they’re working out just to please someone else.
“They have to want to do it for themselves,” she says.
Williamson recalls one gym member who found a creative way to get around her husband pressuring her to work out. “She really wasn’t interested, but she knew if she told him she didn’t go, he’d be upset with her,” Williamson says. So instead of going to the gym, she just took her workout clothes out of her drawer and put them in the laundry hamper so her husband would assume that she had worked out.
“I’ve heard the excuse that people are too old to exercise, and that’s completely ridiculous,” says Tracy Lerch of Lerch Personal Fitness. “The older people get, they really need to be doing something so that functionally they can take care of themselves on a daily basis.”
Some say they can’t exercise because they smoke.
“That’s ridiculous,” Tarbell says. Those smokers are saying, “I’m going to use one bad behavior to prevent me from doing any type of good behaviors,” she says.
But the scapegoats our fitness experts seem to hear about the most are pets.
“I can’t come in,” a client told Williamson one day. Why is that?
“My cat threw up. I’ve got to clean that up.”
“You can’t clean it up and get here in the next 10 minutes?” Williamson said she told that client.
Some clients tell Gorges they can’t make it to the gym because their dogs get lonely.
Jason Zielenski, personal training coordinator at Health Strategies, says a client recently canceled an appointment with him because of a storm. “She has a dog, and when it storms, it just goes crazy and chews up things,” he says. “So I said, `Can you crate it?’ But she didn’t want to leave the dog in the house to tear things up.”
Barrett has several clients who are teachers, and she just had to laugh when one of them called to cancel her workout that day.
“She was talking about all of her paperwork and homework, and the dog had gotten into her stuff and messed everything up and she had to stay and organize that,” Barrett says. “And I said, `Are you literally trying to tell me that the dog ate your homework?’ I said, `Surely you are not trying to give me the `dog ate my homework’ excuse.'”
That’s far from the only excuse Barrett has heard starring dogs.
“The dog wouldn’t come back,” she hears from clients. “I let him out and he ran off. Or he wouldn’t go outside. Or he did go – too far. It’s always the dog’s fault that they can’t exercise.”
Barrett has an antidote for all of those excuses.
“Run after the dog, that’ll be your exercise,” she says.
By the way, fitness experts really don’t buy most of those tales.
“I want to see these pets,” Barrett says with a laugh. “I want to make sure they actually have one.”