I am a noob monk/druid.

[FrenchBreadKitten]

Hi all! I'm a 21 year old 5'8" 136lb skinnyfat female from Australia. My biggest hobbies are playing World of Warcraft (I'm a Gnome Mage), reading SFF genre fiction, and watching Survivor. Alright, the last one isn't that nerdy. I can't help it -- it's a guilty pleasure.

 

I've been trying to convince myself to "bother" getting fit for around a year now, but I haven't really made any progress. I have to be honest: it's because when I work out at home, I'm lazy. When my friends drag me to their gyms, I'm super motivated, but I need to leave my house first. Over the past year, the thing I have managed to succeed in is cleaning up my diet. Nowadays, if you don't mind the TMI, I don't bloat up every month like clockwork! I knew cleaning up my diet would be good, but I didn't realise it would be this good. I'm probably 80-85% paleo "by accident".

 

The one thing that I do stick to is doing yoga about once a week. I look for videos on DoYogaWithMe, and follow them through. I'm excellent at the flexibility parts, and awful at the endurance/breathing/balance parts. Two of my friends have been getting me to come with them to jiu jitsu, but I haven't gone in a fortnight -- the aforementioned laziness. It is SO much easier to grind my professions all night! When they go through stretches at the end of jiu jitsu, I have to switch to more advanced yoga poses to feel a stretch, so I guess that I'm doing something kind of right -- the jiu jitsu instructor said I'd probably be very good at certain submissions due to said flexibility.

 

Anyway, why am I here?

 

Well, I want to "get strong". I joined a gym a few days ago, and I'm going in for a tour and health check on Tuesday. I've applied to start studying nursing, and I don't want to be an unfit sloth on practicum placements; I probably won't keep up! I feel like I have an aptitude for jiu jitsu (I got the hang of the Japanese neck-tie quicker than a lot of the other students, at least!), and I want to have the respiratory endurance to deal with long grappling sessions, as well as the strength to stand a chance!

 

My gym goals: to work through the New Rules Of Lifting For Women weight program (then find something more advanced as required), and be able to run 10km (6.2mi) on the elliptical. My knees are too fragile for the treadmill, so I plan on attending Les Mills Body Balance classes at the gym in the hopes that a combination of weight training and yoga/taichi/pilates combination classes will strengthen my tendons. They get wibbly and fill with fluid; my doctor said strengthening the tendons will fix that, so...

 

What are my handicaps?

 

Not many. I'm petrified of being watched, especially by big guys, so I joined a women's gym and enquired about the dead hours -- my anxiety is a pretty intense handicap, but it's something I can overcome by avoiding human beings like the plague. My biggest handicap is my kidneys. Heat and strenuous activity cause me to dead faint if I don't drink plenty of water -- I'm taking about 250ml (8fl.oz) every hour, almost like clockwork. I had acute kidney failure (which puzzled the doctors, I still don't know why it happened) as a child, and since then have been over-sensitive to even slight dehydration. Mild thirst leads to almost immediate dizziness. My doc says I'll be fine as long as I keep a water bottle with me and am willing to sit down and stop if I become even remotely dizzy. These aren't excuses, of course: laziness is my only excuse.

 

Alright, I've talked too much. I'm a noob and I want to become a lvl 90 monk/druid. Hello.