a stripper themed evening

This evening, I got home from work just in time to dash off to Cardio Striptease at Crunch. Crunch is that overly trendy gym that comes up with all the crazy classes. Fat-burning Pilates. Movies while spinning. Dodgeball aerobics. And I have a free pass for the week.

I’ve done stripper related classes before: burlesque in Vancouver, pole dancing in Venice. So I jumped at the idea of an aerobics class based on stripper moves. And it was so much fun! The instructor led us through a series of moves, in a choreographed dance – but a much easier one than at Raw Groove (dance routines to a live DJ) on Monday. I could keep up, I could do this – and I could totally feel it in my abs, obliques, glutes and quads at the end of the class.

Most of all though, I enjoyed it. This week at Crunch is exactly what I needed to start getting back into serious regular gym time. I stayed for the next class – “Sexy Abs”. Which was half an hour of exercises to develop sexy abs. Which hurt. And then I did fifteen minutes on one of the exercise bikes with the Internet connection. It’s a crappy interface, and a slow connection, but I was able to read my Bloglines while on the bike, and the combination of RSS and cardio is one of the best ideas I’ve ever seen.

After that though, I had a date to meet the lovely and talented Carly at Plan B here on the Westside. Carly and I have sharolyn in common, so when she suggested I meet her at a friend’s party at a strip club, I wasn’t surprised. But the girls there weren’t actually stripping – apparently, they really can’t in Los Angeles. City law. And most of the girls weren’t even good enough dancers to make up for it. Standing with one’s back against a pole and sort of half-assedly gyrating is just not entertaining. However, watching the sleazy old guys trying to pick up the strippers is.

So it was an evening with a lot of stripper-related activities. And I suppose the moral of the story is that now, having done the class, I can totally see why talented strippers have good bodies. If I did that for an hour every day, I’d look like that too. Maybe I should just get a pole installed in my room as part of my home exercise equipment.