I was at my gym — TheGymKC, in midtown — not long ago, and my lower back was sore. It has been sore approximately half the time since the 2011 afternoon when I threw out my back carrying a window air-conditioning unit up two flights of stairs. I was 28. Now I'm 31, an age that seems too young to be griping every other day about back pain.
Usually it's a dull, low-grade ache, but I had played pickup basketball a few days before and awakened the following morning struggling to turn over in bed. After several days of amassing sympathy — hobbling around the office, whining to friends — I heard it suggested that my back might be less prone to these problems if I, you know, exercised it. Maybe, the thinking went, if I regularly activated those muscles, rather than twisting my body in grotesque ways to avoid using them, things would improve.
How had I not thought of that? Also, how does a person exercise his lower back?
So I was lurking around the gym, trying to identify which machines might do the trick. Most workout machines have an illustration of a human body on them, emphasizing the muscles targeted. I moved casually from station to station, stealing glances at the drawings, striving to appear aloof. Eventually I found what looked like a match for my aching back.
I still had to figure out how the thing worked. I looked for another typical gym sight: a three-step illustrated explanation indicating what your body should be doing while you're using a given machine. This wasn't a straightforward butterfly or shoulder-press piece of equipment, though. It involved a very elaborate harness. So I stood there and examined it with my hands crossed over my head, pretending to catch my breath in between reps of an extremely vigorous routine.
After about a minute, I felt confident that I could strap in. I stuck the pin into a low weight, stepped in and positioned my arms and legs where I thought they were supposed to go. Then I tried to move my torso forward, as instructed. That didn't work, so I tried moving backward. Nothing. I figured that maybe I'd set the weight too high, so I adjusted it to the lowest possible setting, then tried again. Nothing. Went backward again. Nothing. I adjusted my arms to the other side of the bar they were resting on. Nope.
I stared at the illustrations — artwork designed to be intuited in an instant, without the aid of words — but my tiny brain just couldn't process what it confronted. Finally I disentangled myself from the machine and stood next to it like an idiot, staring at my feet to avoid the gaze of the hundreds of other gym members. That's when I had my revelation, my rock-bottom moment: I need some outside help here.
Because I belong to a gym, where I've gone about three times a week for the past three years, I've deluded myself into believing that I'm improving my body. But on closer examination, I'm not doing much there. I do three rounds of four workouts: arm curls, a rowing machine, an incline press and a hold-barbells-while-I-squat thing that I'm pretty sure I invented. I flail on the elliptical trainer for the length of a podcast. I rarely sweat. And in the past year, without my changing any aspect of my lifestyle, I've gained about 10 pounds.
About that lifestyle: There's room to rein in some excess. During the day, I behave pretty well. I eat things like granola and eggs and wheat toast, and I make fruit-and-vegetable smoothies with a Magic Bullet. But come 6 or 7 p.m., I turn into a monster. Crazed with hunger, my body demands huge, salty, fatty meals, and I oblige it. I drive to a taco shop or a pizza place or to Oklahoma Joe's (pro tip: Avoid the line and call in the order). And I eat until my body tells me that it can't handle more food. Often the food is gone before this signal arrives.
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