Five Reasons to Love My Gym (and yours!) on Day 10

As we are entering in on the double digits(!), and as I did a super-deep-weird post yesterday, let's talk about something fun today! Let's talk about how much we've enjoyed our Y membership so far! In order to keep going to the gym, I have to like the gym. Which, as of right now, I really do! So it's time to talk about some reasons:

5. It's a clean, safe, well-lit place that's open 24 hours a day! 

It's a blurry internet picture of our real gym!
Why didn't I just use a stock photo of someone else's gym?

You  may be saying to yourself, "I know what town you live in, Liz, the crime rate where you live is almost nonexistent, and you're the one always going on about how women don't get attacked by strangers in the bushes!" Yes, that's true. Especially the strangers in the bushes part. However, it's a psychological thing. I could get in my car and drive to a park so I could walk around. Or I can walk and run around our weird, apartment-land neighborhood where sidewalks spontaneously disappear. Instead, I can come to the gym, whenever I want, where it always seems to have this friendly white glow, there's always someone there to help you if you don't know how to best work out your "Leg Tops," and man, for being a place where people are all sweaty all the time, it is CLEAN!

4. There's a bajillion things to do there! 

This is what healthy people look like. Take note.

Me and Tarver and Kyle go to the gym and we're all, "What do you wanna do?" Yesterday, for instance, we warmed up and stretched out, I went on a treadmill with some incline and Tarver and Kyle got their elliptical on for half an hour. Then we found those half-ball balancer things and played catch with a medicine ball while trying to stay upright-- that was hard but totally fun! Then we stretched out and went home.  But we could have just as easily "raced," on stationary bikes, done a circuit of weights then gone to the sauna. We could have climbed the rock wall,  done some stair steps or played basketball. We could even have gotten crushed in a Simple Step/Cardio class! Or we could go to the other location and go SWIMMING! So many options!

3. Mostly the People are Nice or Are at Least too Busy With Their Own Stuff to Be Mean

Are these folks nice? Mean? Who knows?
You'll never talk to them, so it doesn't matter!

This is one of my biggest things about going to exercise is that I am a large human being. People are downright cruel to fat women. It's everywhere; in print media, on TV and especially on the internet. People somewhere have these thoughts about bigger women, and I am always afraid that someone will say something mean to me. But at the gym, nobody seems to care. They're busy!  Everyone is at the gym for a different reason and they aren't there to look at me or even to judge me. Yes, I'm usually one of the bigger people in the gym, but usually people are busy on their 50th pullup or their 10th mile on the treadmill to notice me. Occasionally, I catch someone's eye and sometimes they smile. This is okay with me :)

2. It's Kinda Awesome

Our Gym has several of these fancy water fountains!

I didn't know life had gotten so high tech! Our gym has neat machines like recumbent bikes where you can watch yourself on the screen, race with other people, save your scores, and come back to it later! What?! We live in the future. The fancy water fountain pictured above has a bottle-refiller that just magically senses when you put your bottle on there. Then it tells you how many plastic bottles that machine has saved-- awesome!  Besides even the high-tech stuff, it does other cool things too like, if I wanna take a shower, I don't have to bring a towel or a blow dryer, They have one, just for me! And they have little towels for when I'm working out! And I don't have to wash them! Amazing! 

And finally,

1. I feel GREAT afterward.

Okay, maybe not this great.

Stepping outside after exercising is one of the best feelings ever. I sleep better on the days I exercise, I eat better on the days I exercise, and I feel better about MYSELF when I exercise. It's a grand experience.

What do you love about your exercise place?