Page 31 of Allure

“Great!” Dawn glances at me. “You can go check out the weights. Maybe do some squats and lunges.”

“I’m Heather,” the woman says.

“I’m Dawn, and this is Brooke.”

“Nice to meet you. I’ll see you soon, Dawn, okay?”

Dawn barely acknowledges me, but I don’t mind. She needs this, to have passion for her weight loss journey. I just hope it doesn’t take over her entire life. She honestly doesn’t need to lose that much. Maybe ten pounds. Fifteen.

I head over to the weights. They’re a bit intimidating, I won’t lie, and I don’t touch any of them, instead doing some stretches first. Sensei and Declan have both hammered into us karate students that stretching is a must or else you risk injury. I do not want to be sidelined already.

It’s not a surprise that there are a lot more guys over here than women, but they ignore me almost to the point of it being deliberate, but that suits me just fine. Well, to some extent. I lifted weights for a semester in high school for gym class, but I never really learned proper technique, so some guidance would be nice.

I do know how to do squats and lunges without any weights, so I do some of those, making sure my knee hits the floor with every lunge.

“You don’t want to actually hit the ground,” a woman says, coming up to me. She looks like she’s twelve, which makes me pause. “You’ll hurt your knee doing it that way. Just hover above it.”

She grabs two twenties off the rack and demonstrates a perfect backward lunge, her knee barely hovering above the ground.

“Your turn,” she says, straightening, her feet coming together for a moment before she steps back with the other leg.

I feel a bit silly not using any weights, but I do what she says.

“Lower,” she says.

I listen and wait for her to nod.

I start to come up.

“If you aren’t going to use more than just bodyweight, then you might want to do this.” The girl does another lunge, but this time, she gets into position and then moves up and down, just a tiny movement. “It’ll start burning really quickly,” she warns.

She’s still holding the weights, and her form is perfect, but her legs… She doesn’t look all that strong.

“What is it?” she asks.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but you look so young.”

“I get that a lot,” she says with a laugh. “I’m going to be carded until I’m thirty-five!”

“Wait, you’re twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two in a week.”

“No way.”

“Thought I was fifteen?”

“Something like that,” I mumble, my mind blown.

“They say that lifting weights can help keep you young. Who knows?”

“You also… I was worried about looking bulky…”

"Nah. Women can and should lift heavy weights, in my opinion. It helps you to build muscle faster than doing lower weights and more reps. But when you're first starting out, bodyweight is fine. Make sure you're doing the move correctly and with proper form first. Once you have that down, use light weights and progress and build. But unless a woman takes steroids, she's not going to become massively huge. You don't have to worry about that."

“Oh, good,” I say, relieved.

She guides me through pulsing, which is what that short up and down movement is, with both lunges and squats before apologizing and having to jet. I didn’t even get a chance to get her name, but I really appreciate the time she took to help me out.

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