Tonight I went to my Lululemon Cleveland Showroom for a “Knock Out Evening of Fitness Boxing and Goal Setting”.
When I first heard about it from the store manager Anjua I immediately thought it would be a “kickboxing” seminar. I’ve taken a class before…kind of punching, kind of kicking, kind of aerobicizing. She said that King’s Gym was bringing several people who would set up stations to focus on specific skills. OK…cool. Kind of low-impact, maybe learn more about how my body should be positioned should I get to a class again.
The final piece of the evening would be a discussion about goal setting. People break New Year’s Resolutions for many reasons. We were going to have a group discussion about how to set real concrete goals rather than wishy-washy resolutions. This should be pretty nifty!
Well, it turns out that this Knock Out session was more than I had expected. We were broken up into sets of 2 or 3, and sent for about 10-15 minutes of time at 4 different stations. I began with Ed, one of the owners of King’s, who put us through some calisthenics. Push-ups, jumping jacks, leg lifts, squats…sweaty grrrrl was starting to sweat!
Next it was onto 6’6″ women’s boxing champion Vonda to get a quick overview on punching. Far more intimidating in stature than demeanor, she had us put on boxing gloves, and gave us a quick tutorial on jabbing, upper cuts and hooks. She went to us one by one with pads on her hands and we punched away while she helped us fine-tune our form. “This is really satisfying” I blurted out after a string of 20 hard right hooks into her hand. She smiled and nodded…knowingly.
Then we moved onto Robert, a real-life boxing trainer who I could TOTALLY picture as a character in a boxing epic. He was teaching us to kick. Again he had the hand pads, and I really have to applaud his skill/bravery. At one point he had us face away from him and blindly kick backwards. He fearlessly walked behind each of us, putting reaching out his padded hands to hit our flailing, off-balance feet. “You’re kickin’ hard!” he said to the girl to my right. “Sorry!” she said. “Sorry?! There’s no sorry in boxing! You’re supposed to hit people!”
Pretty sweaty at this point, and starting to get a bit worn out, I was happy to move on to Bobby‘s station, which looked like the stretch and cool-down area. Nope, AB WORK TIME! She put us through a short series of Pillati and Yoga style, challenging exercises that I’m going to add to my weekly workouts. Moved some ab muscles I haven’t touched in a while. Blessedly, her session DID in fact end with some nice stretches, and we were done.
Overall an unexpectedly great evening workout, and I got to try something completely new to me.
AND I GOT TO WEAR BOXING GLOVES!
Now on to the touchy-feelie stuff…and it too was a good little mini-workshop 🙂 There were probably only about 6 of us at this point. Anjua led the group in a discussion that I think is actually part of a Goals Not Resolutions campaign from Lululemon. “Successful people replace the words “wish,” “should” and “try” with “I WILL.””, the Showroom web site says. “Forget new year’s resolutions and jump start your future…”
Anjua began by asking us each to write on a piece of paper one thing that if we knew we could do it tomorrow with 100% guaranteed success, and one thing that right now we think we have reached our personal best at doing.
This opened up a discussion about goal setting…how to set them in a way that encourages solid results.
- Do not be afraid to fail
- Know that goals, long term goals, will sometimes have to change due to life’s curve balls…don’t quit, but don’t stick to something that has become a moot point. Adjust.
- Be specific in what you are trying to achieve (yep, mine was WAY to general)
- Write them down
- Break down your goal into mini goals that lead you to the ultimate
- Set CONCRETE deadlines
The group was surprisingly open, and very inspirational. I actually had to hold back some tears at one point as people were helping me dissect my thoughts a bit and extract some possibilities…I left feeling pretty durn good.
AND I GOT TO WEAR BOXING GLOVES!
xo
en
