Between Boyfriends (Book 1 in the Between Boyfriends Series)

Chapter 16

Two days after Jan was fired from the salon, she had her first session of the year with Shauna. She decided to 'fess up about the job just so she could tell Shauna how she got fired. The recitation literally caused Shauna to roll on the floor laughing.

It was during the demonstration of a particularly horrid sounding exercise that Jan attempted to distract her trainer with the tale. As Shauna balanced precariously on a sixty-five centimeter stability ball and executed a perfect series of ball crunches, Jan told her the "smelly, dog-hair ridden, hole-in-the-wall salon" part of the story and Shauna laughed so hard she fell backwards off the ball and rolled like a ninja into a kneeling position.

Jan's jaw dropped. "If you ever wanted to get out of personal training, I'm sure you could make it as a stunt double," she said with awe. When most people fell, they really fell, as in broken bones and head injuries. Shauna did not make a sound when she hit the ground.

"Ten years of martial arts will teach you how to fall correctly," Shauna said as she jogged to retrieve the ball, which had rolled away just as gracefully but in a different direction.

And to think that for all these years, it wasn't her clumsiness and subsequent falls that was the problem, Jan thought. It was that she was falling incorrectly. How could she have been so naïve?

"Now, stop trying to distract me and get on this ball," Shauna commanded with a smile.

Jan's lower lip came out and she stomped the ground in a half-hearted imitation of a temper tantrum. "I don't want to," she whined.

"Too bad." Shauna fixed her with an intimidating look that made Jan's hair sweat. "I've always got something worse for you to do if you prefer."

Jan snorted. I'll bet you do.

"All right, all right. I give," Jan said, but instead switched stall tactics. "Can you just show me how that goes one more time? Please?"

Shauna crossed her arms and scowled. "Now," she snapped.

Jan whined again and proclaimed for the hundredth time how much better hiring a personal trainer would be if the trainer could do the exercises for you.

"You could simply visualize the exercises instead. Science has demonstrated that the same muscles fire when you imagine you are doing exercises as when you physically do them."

Jan's mind was blown. What had she been doing these past months?

"Why can't I just do that?"

Shauna rolled her eyes. "Maybe you could, but I have yet to see anyone pull it off. Just because the same muscles fire doesn't mean they work at the same intensity."

Jan whined, "Why isn't anything easy?"

"First of all, visualization to the degree that you really feel you are doing something takes a lot of mental effort. It is not easy. Secondly, just because I haven't seen anyone do it doesn't mean it isn't possible. I know plenty of clients who have reached their target weights simply by believing they could. They followed the same programs as everyone else, but they had faith. Other clients got stuck on the belief that they had to lose weight and rarely succeeded. If you think you have to lose weight or focus on how weak you are now, you will never be thin and you will never be strong. The way you think does make a difference in your results."

Jan wondered how her thinking affected her workouts. Does thinking an exercise is too difficult for me make it harder for me to do?

"So if I visualized myself doing the exercise you just showed me, and I thought that it was as easy for me to do as it was for you, it would be?"