Fitness Flops and Workout Whomps

Or in other words, ways in which I regularly embarrass myself at the gym.

On the daily, I am not a particularly graceful person, and I tend to become even less functional of a human being when I work out. Some girls look totally hot and graceful and sporty when they get their sweat on, but I generally end up looking something more like this:

Potentially an overstatement, but this gif gets funnier
the longer you stare at it.

I'll tell myself for the time being that every person is guilty of committing these workout faux-pas, and if that's not the case, just don't tell me, alright? Here's how we all (right? RIGHT?) make asses of ourselves while working out.

The Stairmaster Stumble
I'm talking about the tall, continually moving stair belt sort of machine here. I love the stairmaster because it's a challenging alternative to the treadmill (and jogging wrecks my shin splints after a while). After 10-15 minutes of plodding up and up though, the steps start to seem higher than they had been when I began. A single misstep makes the whole thing goes CRASH BANG LOOK EVERYONE SHE TRIPPED LOL and then it's a mad scramble to back to the top to avoid being rudely deposited onto the floor.

Then I shiftily look left and right to try to gauge how many people witnessed the incident.

Treadmill Trippin'
It happens for a lot of reasons. Maybe the song changed to something with a radically different tempo. Maybe I got too comfortable in the stride, spaced out, and started to drift to the side of the belt. Maybe I kicked myself in the back of the ankle for the thousandth time and literally tripped over my own feet.

Maybe all three of these things happen within the same jogging sesh and everyone else is all "is she alright or like, about to pass out from exhaustion or something?" My balance is sub-par.

iPod Drop
Probably the loudest of the bloopers. When the iPod/iPhone/anonymous Android device falls, the only recovery option is to stop the machine, get off, and pick it up off the floor while audibly cursing and silently praying that the screen hasn't smashed into a million pieces. Literally everyone else in the room will slow down to make like One Republic and stop and stare at the entire process while whispering "ooh, ooh, no that's not very good, no." It's the rubber-necking of the cardio room.

Bounce and Stop
If you haven't ever heard me whine about my height before, I'm 4'10", which means that my chest area is, um, close to the panel of buttons on most treadmills. This means that if I'm not careful, the girls might bounce right on top of the large pause/stop button, bringing my jog to an unexpected halt.

In other words, my boobs turn off the treadmill sometimes.

Unintentional Dance Party
The endorphins are high, I'm feeling good, and how else am I supposed to let it all out when the music shakes my bones and there's a tune-splosion happening in my brain? The only option is an above-the-waist dance party. Oh sure, I'm fully aware that I look like a damn fool when I bust out the Beyonce finger dance like what's going on over to the right here, but when the front of my brain is all "don't fall off the machine; keep moving plz," the best dance I can pull off (if you want to call it that) consists of me basically pointing all over in different directions.

Let's be real. We've all made asses of ourselves in the cardio room. Workout klutziness can be boiled down into an inspirational metaphor like so: The road to fitness is a bumpy and rocky one. Everybody trips every once in awhile.