Interview with Joanna Southerland

After the 7 AM body tone class, I took the opportunity to interview the instructor, Joanna Southerland.  During the class she was loud, inspiring, and made plenty of cracks against boyfriends and soda, so I wasn't too worried about her judging my inability to use anything more than 2 pound weights.  What I didn't realize, however, was that she had such a deep story.

Joanna Southerland, as I pointed out in my earlier post about her body tone class, is a focused and high-energy individual.  She is passionate about exercise, and has teaching the body tone course for 10 years. On top of that, she has been instructing fitness courses for 32 years.

Me: What got you into teaching fitness?
Joanna: "I've just always been a jock, and my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was seven months old. I made exercise an important part of my entire family's life.  [My son] now has a top ten cycling Team Novo Nordisk, they go all over the world and compete in high end events."

After a little research I found that Team Norvo Nordisk was co-founded by Joanna's son in 2006, and since then has expanded to include almost 100 athletes-- all of which are diagnosed with  diabetes.  More information can be found on their Twitter or Facebook Page.

Now, just because Joanna can come off as a little abrasive when she is in fitness instructor bad-ass mode, no one should be deterred from a little passion. Joanna gives some good tips when it comes to those of us who are slightly afraid of starting our fitness journey.

She says that you will have to suffer for 4-5 months. There's no way of getting around that fact; you have to have discipline and believe your instructor that it will happen. If you're not used to exercising you have to keep it up, and you're going to be sore the first one to two weeks.  The soreness will go away if you keep up regular exercise, and only after a few months will you start to see results.

Not only that, but you have to keep an eye on what you eat.  That does not mean that you have to become a calorie-counting robot, but you have to be honest.  Joanna suggests using apps such as Daily Burn or Daily Plate to track your food intake.  The trick is to put in everything you eat, including the handful of chocolate chips you sneak out of your roommate's side of the fridge.You can't fudge the data, you need to face the facts.  As Joanna says, you need to know what 10 potato chips are.

Eventually, as you have the food tracking constantly in the back of your mind and the hours of burn and pain in your muscles, you will start to naturally reject foods that are obviously unhealthy.  I mean, do you even know how donuts are made?

Day One: Toning the Fears

Difficulty: 

I have a very strange, non-existent sleep schedule.  Working the graveyard shift three nights a week has turned me into a quasi-vampire, mostly in the respects that I have a minimal social life and I prefer to sleep during the day. This lack of normalcy led me to wake up at five thirty this morning without the ability to fall back asleep.  At six fifteen, when I understood that I would not be going to sleep, something came over me and I decided to go to the gym.

Since there was no way in hell that I would take a spinning class at 7AM, I decided to participate in the 7 AM body tone class with Joanna Southerland.  I have been wanting to go to the class since the beginning of the semester, but have always put it off for one reason or another. Now I didn't have much of an excuse, and it sounded like it was going to be one of the easiest classes that the Leach had to offer.

I was wrong.

First, a bit of back story: generally when I get off work at seven in the morning I make my way over to the early morning yoga class.  It helps me stretch after a long night of sitting on my ass, and it helps me deny the fact that I am the laziest person you'll ever meet.  During said yoga sessions, there is always a class happening in the adjacent room. That class is loud, involves a lot of movement, and frankly is terrifying to witness.

What my naive self did not realize at the time was that this was that class.

The class was both easier and harder than I was expecting.  Some of the difficulty lay in the fact that I had no idea what was going on half the time.  Everyone already knew what equipment to gather at the beginning of the class, whereas I managed to look like a lost sheep in a How it's Made episode. I was smart enough, at least, to take the smallest weights because we ended up using them almost every minute of the exercise.  It was loud; it was intensive; yet the instructor was so pumped about keeping our guts sucked in and pushing ourselves, and that combined with incredibly loud music kept me going. 

By the end of the class I was coated in sweat, red-faced, and exhilarated.  It was the strangest thing; I wasn't even sore. During the exercise I could feel my muscles burning under the strain, but afterwards I was in some sort of high.  It was great. By the end of the day I started feeling the soreness all over, and right now (the next day) I'm whining like a little bitch every time that I have to stand up or walk the stairs.

I'm definitely coming back.

Why Do I Do This?

As I explained under the "About Me" section, I don't like exercise.  I don't like sweating.  I don't like how I look in workout clothes.  I don't like interrupting my time spent laying in bed with a bowl of ice cream and Parks and Rec.  These prejudices are deeply rooted in my lethargic being, and I have grudgingly decided to try to change that.

Since there is a dismal chance that I will maintain any semblance of a workout schedule if I do this on my own, I have decided to create this blog for all of the FSU student's needs.  I intend on attempting every group exercise class that Campus Rec has to offer, and I hope that through my experience I will be able to enlighten those who are too nervous to try something new.

Yes, I'm scared.

My ultimate goal, at the end of the day, is to complete a "stadium." For me, a "stadium" is the single most terrifying thing in existence. It includes running up and down all of the stairs in the Doak Campbell Stadium. Once I complete all of the leach classes I will try my  hand at this terrifying feat.

I don't expect to get far, but I'm gonna try it.