Birthdays
I love Birthdays. I love my birthday and I love other people’s birthday. I love cake and I especially love frosting. Actually its not even the cake that I love, it’s pretty much just the frosting. My favorite would have to be cream cheese frosting but I’ll pretty much take any kind of buttercream frosting. I also love that you get to go out to your favorite restaurant and get your favorite food and for some reason when it’s your birthday it just tastes better. It’s one day out of the whole year that you get to have all to yourself.
But honestly there is just something special about having a day to celebrate who you are, the years that have brought the wrinkles under the eyes or the cellulite behind the legs. The years that brought confidence and relationships. The years that took you further from who you were and closer to who you want to be. Birthdays are a time we get to evaluate ourselves, and a lot of times we do it by celebrating with the people we most want to be with. Sometimes it is a right now person and sometimes it is a forever person, but regardless it’s a celebration.
Not only do I love frosting but I love to be a part of birthday celebrations. I love making a cake, with frosting, and drinking a beer or two. I love going out for coffee or cocktails. Or even just a good ole ass kicking in the studio, which is what we do for birthdays. The studio has a way of celebrating birthdays, you get to choose whatever workout you want on your birthday.
It started out as a way to add some celebrations to the birthday girl and it has become something that is planned out and looked forward to. And everyone is different in how they choose their workouts. Some people tell me what they don’t want to do. Some give me elaborate lists of the things they really enjoy doing. Others just want to forget their birthdays altogether and end up with at least a few of their favorite exercises.
The only thing I warn people about for their birthdays is, be specific. Now some people think I’m a bit sadistic, but thats just hearsay. For example if you say you would love to do Bulgarian Split Squats, I might make them double kettlebell Bulgarian Split Squats. I figure, if you wanted body weight you would have said body weight. Same thing with the sled pulls, you might want to say two plate or three plate, because I might decide to do five or six plates. So really, it’s not my fault if I fill in the blanks when there are blanks to be filled. And on the final note here, I tell people to be specific. I even had one recent birthday girl write down on the wall exercises she liked and didn’t like for about a month before the day. She tried to be as specific as possible (and just for the record, I stuck with the list entirely but there were still blanks to be filled in).
Some of my favorite workouts are when we play with the numbers. On a 50th birthday we did 50 second rounds. On a 52nd birthday, all the repetitions in a circuit equalled 52. When our little lady graduated high school we did 20 different exercises 16 times to give us 2016. So pretty much it is something I really look forward to and love to do. And not only do I let the birthday girl decide on the workout, I also let her pick the music for the day, which is a huge deal since I have pretty shitty taste in music and play inappropriate rap music on Fridays. Free choice on music, unless I really don’t like it and then I will probably lie and say I can’t add another pandora station.
Recently we even had a dance party. In the past I have reserved dance parties for my nights alone with the minis or a alcohol induced evening out, but I have never thought about a sober afternoon with about 15 other people. And it worked. She sent me the playlist, I put a sheet over the mirror, because without alcohol we can keep our self confidence over our dance moves a lot higher if we don’t have to actually see ourselves. I even hung up Christmas lights so the unflattering effect of fluorescent lights wouldn't hinder our the glow of sweat as we broke it down at 5pm.
Birthdays should be a special day, a day we get to have our asses kicked with some pretty fun people. I love watching people year to year change the way they feel about themselves. I love that we all become a part of each others celebrations. Some sport the bikini that they worked so hard to wear. Others come in and find a roomful of friends waiting for them. And every so often cupcakes with frosting are brought in, some might call it job security, I just say I love frosting so any excuse to make something that can hold a lot of frosting is a great excuse.