I have found my preferred form of exercise for losing weight – and what do you know, it involves smacking the crap out of something. I’m sure everyone is truly amazed but there you go. 😉
We got a heavy bag along with the assorted ironmongery needed to hang it from the roof of the deck, and a set of gloves. Actually, to be completely accurate, we got two sets of gloves – a big set of 12 oz actual boxing gloves for me, and a small set of baby blue mitts for Jen. She looked at the pink ones, and just couldn’t do it.
My first outing was not great.
Working in IT, I have often felt that I am probably a bit ‘soft’ – I imagine that digging ditches for a living would make you a bit more solid. A few minutes with the heavy bag confirmed that – my wrists felt like I had been run over, my knuckles were all red and inflamed, and if truth be told, the hardest I had hit the bag… well, I would imagine a good number of teenage girls could hit a bag harder than that.
Some more googling revealed that, in all probability, I wasn’t doing it right.
I vaguely remember seeing boxers wrapping their hands in bandages, but hadn’t quite understood why… and now I do! I got myself a set of everlast wraps, followed a good intro online and got myself some wrapped hands. ooooh.
Whether it’s the effect of the wraps, or a subtle bit of suggestion about yellow spandex… but I suddenly felt that I no longer had soft keyboard user’s hands, but a set of Wolverine claws. I resisted the temptation to punch the wall (much) and slipped on the big gloves.
I guess the fact that my wrapped hands could fit easily into the gloves, which now fitted a lot better, should have given a clue as to what went wrong the first time.. and man, can I hit hard 😀
Since we decided to lose the weight, I have lost over fifty pounds. As the picture shows, I still have a long way to go, but the 20 or so pounds I need to lose to get back into the healthy range will be a bit less challenging when there’s a way to build up a good sweat that’s this damn satisfying 😀