The Gym and Dancing

It turns out that there are some very good reasons to go to the gym and to dance, other than because when you do these things with the right people they can be great fun (I’m missing all my lovely dance partners and my gym buddies). Who knew exercise could have benefits? 😉

Here are some examples of where strength and balance have come in handy for me recently (and this is before I start wielding a shovel on site).

Grip Strength

My grip strength (which is terrible but not nearly as terrible as it was before I started going to the gym and hanging from a bar or wafting a barbell over my head) came in handy on the plane. They gave us water bottles that were very difficult to open, the woman next to me tried and failed and asked two of her friends who also couldn’t do it. And I was able to open both mine and hers. Grip strength – not just an indicator of longevity, also useful for not getting dehydrated on long haul flights.

Balance

Balance (thank you dancing and the gym as well), is very helpful on crowded buses in unreliable traffic (not yet on this trip, but it is only a matter of time). Good balance is also required for getting showered, dried, dressed in a space where touching anything is a bad idea. Also essential for squat toilets (though I haven’t had any of those on this trip yet either). Squat toilets on Indian trains where you really don’t want to touch anything and the whole thing is moving erratically are in my future (and my past) – best getting working on my core strength, squats, stability.

Fancy Footwork

Being light on my feet (thank you Quickstep and Viennese Waltz, especially with those excellent leaders with rather long legs) is very helpful when jumping on and off pavements whilst navigating slow moving pedestrians. Also, shoulder leads (Foxtrot leaders, you know who you are) are very handy for squeezing through smaller gaps.

Clean and Jerk

I haven’t needed to lift a barbell from the floor to my shoulders to then lift it overhead, but I did need to lift my rucksack into my locker at the hostel I was staying in. So I lifted it from the ground to my knees, then to chest height, then up to eye height – well, my eye height, mostly everyone else won’t have needed that third step). My rucksack is only about 14kg, but it doesn’t lift itself. And it was easier than asking to swap lockers with someone taller who had a lower locker.

Figure Four Stretch

Many of you will know the figure four stretch. You stand on one leg (bending it) and cross the ankle of the free leg over the knee of the standing leg. Watch someone else do it and you’ll see why it is called the 4. This, it turns out, is essential for putting on a sock when you’re in a wet room and don’t really want to touch the floor, the walls, the hand basin, the toilet cistern, anything. It’s also a good glute stretch – two for the price of four(?).

Box Step Ups

This is where you step onto a box and then back down again. Helpful for stepping from the road onto the pavement when navigating pedestrians, motorbikes, cyclists, dogs, piles of rubbish, holes in the ground, wet concrete, etc. And given that the pavement height here can vary a lot, it is sometimes the height of a box in the gym. Note: box jumps are never required and burpee box jumps exist only so that gym coaches can get their own back on maths teachers (the equivalent of factorising a quadratic – painful for the person doing them, sadistically funny for the person watching, and not actually relevant in real life, despite the instructor’s assurances). Gym coaches who are also maths teachers clearly have all the fun (all of it)!

There may well be a follow up post to this after I’ve actually been on a building site for while. Watch this space!