Gym? I hate the gym.

It's true, I hate gyms. I've always hated them. Every gym I've ever set foot in, I've hated immediately.

Now I like the gym. I think it's a miracle I've had this change of heart, and it's for the better. My boyfriend started going to the gym on campus and loved it so much that he convinced me to come with him and buy a month's membership on my first day.

This gym is really nice, although all I've seen is the weight room. The weight room has two sides: a woman's side, where all the women go (treadmills, elipticals, stationary bikes, mats, and a few pieces of equipment), and the men's side, where all the men go and very few women (dumbells and barbells).

I've figured out why there's this great divide with only a few exceptions. The kinds of exercises that go on in the free weight side of the gym are very hard for women to do. We have a tiny fraction of the strength a man has naturally, so all the exercises are awkward and hard for us even with an empty bar. I persevere.

One of the things my boyfriend was teaching me to do are the clean and jerk. In the olympics, there are two weightlifting events that every competitor must do: the clean and jerk, and the snatch. The snatch is the one with a wide grip, where the weight comes up off the floor and straight above your head with only one squat. The clean and jerk uses more weight, and is broken into three mini-parts: the deadlift, which gets the weight up to your hips; the clean, which gets the weight up to your shoulders; and the jerk, which gets it above your head.

Deadlifts? Those were easy to do. Not easy with a lot of weight, but for my first times with everything, I was using either an empty bar or one with very little weight. The clean kills me though. I'm terrible at it. You have to jump and get under the bar, letting the weight fall onto your meaty chest & shoulders. In my case, the bar falls right onto my sternum, so I'm easing the bar down with my arms to protect my chest. There has to be a better way to do this?

I found out that I was really good at jerks, which is enough motivation to get me to keep working on my cleans. I figured out that I do best with a split jerk, probably because I like jumping with one foot instead of two, and I'd rather lunge than squat because I have terrible knees.

This is not all I do at the gym, but I will definitely be monitering my improvements in those exercises very closely. Gym? I love the gym!