On saggy balls
Maybe two years ago, I was shopping with my friend Julie and she dragged me into the sports section of a K-Mart to check out the gym balls. I’d never seen the like before: sure, I’d ridden on those big rubber inflatable balls with faces and horns on them, when I was a kid. But I hadn’t been keeping up with home exercise fads. I thought ‘Pilates’ was pronounced the same as ‘pirates’.
Julie had decided she was in the market for a gym ball, but I kind of ridiculed her out of the purchase. The sales droid tried to up-sell her to the Reebok model, which was three times the price of the generic model but it had a Reebok sticker on it and featured ‘anti-burst technology’. When he told us that I burst out laughing. Then I saw a workout video starring Gay Gasper and became hysterical. The droid got annoyed at me and we left, empty-handed.
Fast forward to, I don’t know, a month or two ago, when my physiotherapist recommended I get a gym ball for myself. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I would have forbidden any exercise device from entering my home. But this was not the most humiliating advice that I have been given since I injured my back. The most humiliating advice was to purchase a tennis ball to sit on and wriggle when the muscles in my right buttock became particularly tense. And yes, I bought a tennis ball.
The tennis ball only cost me sixty cents. A gym ball was going to cost a lot more, even if I got the cheap pro-burst model. Luckily, a friend had a hand-me-down gym ball (an impulse purchase? A passed-by fad?) which she handed down to me. Guess what? It’s got the Reebok sticker on it.
So I lie on my back and lay my legs on top of the ball and do various exercises with the thing. I think it has worked: I can feel the hard muscles in my abdomen, beneath the layer of flab, like the flesh of an over-ripe peach covering the hard stone in the centre. Or a bean bag with a block of concrete in the middle.
The problem with hand-me-downs is they don’t always come with all the pieces. In my case, I’ve got the ball but I don’t have the pump (or, for that matter, the video). And the ball’s gotten hellasaggy. If I try to sit on it I wind up sitting in it.
Here’s the problem: the ball doesn’t have a valve, just a hole with a little plastic plug. Nothing to put your lips to. Nothing to fit a bicycle pump to, or to attach to a compressor. I’m going to have to go find a ball pump. Which is a bloody scam.
And damn me if there isn’t an aftermarket for gym ball pumps. I favour the ‘Blaster Hi-Speed Power Pump’ from Yoga-Mad®, which looks exactly the same as all the other pumps I’ve seen online except, I imagine, it’s got a different sticker on it. And maybe racing stripes. Broom broom!
Or I’m going to have to go to a sporting gear shop, saggy ball under one arm, and ask them very nicely if they’ll blow it up for me.
Oh man.