by Dave Barry
The white cells are your body’s House Detectives. Most of the time they lounge around the bloodstream, telling jokes and forming the occasional cyst. But they swing into action the instant your body is invaded by one of the many enemy organisms that can get into your bloodstream, these being bacteria, viruses, rotifers, conifers, parameciums, cholesterol, tiny little lockjaw germs that dwell on the ends of all sharp objects, antacids, riboflavin, and the plague. As soon as the white cells spot one of these, they drop whatever they’re doing and pursue it on a wild and often hilarious chase through your various organs, which sometimes results in damage to innocent tissue. Eventually they catch the invader and tie its tentacles behind its back with antibodies, which are the body’s Handcuffs, and deport it via the bowel.
Of course this is just a brief rundown on your various organs and systems; in the short space I have here, it’s very difficult for me to explain all of your body’s complexities and subtleties in any detail, or even get any facts right. For more information, I suggest you attend Harvard Medical School, which I believe is in Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, let’s turn the page and really get started on our fitness program! Or at least limber up.
Chapter 2. Getting Ready To Get Started
One of the most exciting aspects of getting into fitness is that you get to wear modern fitness-oriented clothing, clothing that makes a statement to the world around you. “Look,” it states, “I have purchased some fitness-oriented clothing.”
Up until about 15 years ago, the only fitness clothing available for men was the plain grey sweat suit, which we fitness experts now recognize as totally inadequate in terms of retail markup. Fitness wear for females consisted of those high-school gym outfits colored Digestive Enzyme Green; there was no fitness clothing available at all for adult women, because the only forms of exercise deemed appropriate for them were labor and driving station wagons.
As the fitness craze developed, however, all kinds of “active sportswear” became available from famous designers who think nothing of putting their names on your clothing, but who would have the servants set the dogs on you if you ever tried to put your name on their clothing. Today it’s not uncommon for people to wear their active sportswear to the shopping mall, to work, to the opera, to state funerals, etc. Recently, an attorney argued a major case before the U.S. Supreme Court while wearing a puce jogging outfit! The justices didn’t seem to mind at all, although this could also have been partly because they had fallen asleep.
The point is, you want to choose your fitness-program clothing carefully because chances are you’ll be wearing it to do much more than just exercise. In fact, you’ll probably be wearing it to do everything but exercise, since there is growing medical evidence that exercise can make you tired and sweaty, as we’ll see in later chapters.
The Basic Fitness Fashion Look for Women
This is, of course, the leotard and tights, which is the preferred outfit because it shows every bodily flaw a woman has, no matter how minute, so that a woman who, disguised in her street clothes, looks like Victoria Principal will, when she puts on her leotard, transform herself into Bertha the Amazing Land Whale. This encourages her to exercise vigorously and watch what she eats. She cannot, of course, drink anything, as there is no way to go to the bathroom in a leotard and tights.
Many a woman who suffers an exercise-related injury during an aerobic workout is forced to lie in great pain for hours on her exercise mat, trapped, while frustrated rescue personnel wait for the helicopter to bring the various specialized torches, saws, and other equipment they need to free her from her tights and leotard so they can render medical treatment.
Extremely Important Advice Concerning Danskin Brand Thermal Calf Protection Devices
Several years ago, a crack team of medical fashion experts determined that cold air tends to form pockets around the calves of fashionable, fitness-oriented women. This breakthrough discovery explained the sudden upsurge in calf-related hospitalizations that occurred at the onset of the fitness craze and soon reached epidemic proportions. As one nationally reknowned physician, whose name is available upon request, put it, “Never in my 600 years of practicing medicine had I seen so many deaths directly attributable to calf coldness. If only we had known then the importance of wearing Danskin brand thermal calf protection devices!”
So the bottom line is: Do not view these devices as just another semiretarded fashion trend. View them as essential medical protection, every bit as important as lip gloss.
Fitness Fashion for Men
What you want, men, is a fashion look that gives you freedom of movement but at the same time displays, in large letters, the names of at least three major manufacturers of sporting equipment. Also you want to wear a headband and wristbands to absorb the tremendous outpouring of sweat that we males emit when we are engaged in strenuous masculine physical activity. (If you are one of those unfortunate males who does not emit tremendous outpourings of sweat, you should purchase, from the Nike Corporation, a container of “Pro-spiration” spray-on sweat droplets, which you apply discreetly in the locker room before you begin your workout.)
Ideally, of course, you will also sport some evidence of a semicrippling football injury. The best kind is a medical knee contraption of such enormous size and complexity that your racquetball opponent will feel like absolute pond scum if he hits the ball anywhere other than directly to you. Or you might want to look into a new product from the Adidas Corporation called “The All-Scars,” which are large, realistic, and extremely repulsive synthetic removable knee scars patterned after those belonging to famous battered sports legends such as Joe Namath.
Fitness with Computers
Can you use a personal home computer in your fitness program? You bet! Computers are incredibly versatile machines that can do everything from screw up your airplane reservation to cause an income tax blunder that gets you sentenced to a life term in a slimy walled federal prison so utterly desolate that the inmates pay rodents for sex! So they’re a “natural” for the fitness movement!
One obvious way to use a computer, of course, is to record your daily fitness statistics such as weight, height, age, etc., on it, using a felt-tipped marker. But the best way to really unleash the power of a computer is to lift it up and set it down repeatedly, thus building muscle mass and definition. As you become stronger, you can gradually add weight, in the form of “disk drives,” until eventually you move up to a heavier computer—and perhaps someday even reach the point where you can hoist what computer bodybuilding enthusiasts call a “mainframe” computer!
For the average person who does not have a background in data processing, I generally recommend starting out with a 35-pound computer. Unfortunately, computer weights are measured not in pounds, but in “K’s” (as in 512K), which stands for “kilograms.” There is a way to convert kilograms to pounds, but it is almost always fatal, so I recommend, as a wise consumer tip, that you go through your entire planned computer-lifting routine right at the store with several reputable computers, checking each for heft, balance, and tendency to break into 600,000 tiny pieces when you lift it over your head and drop it, before you actually purchase anything.
Of course, some of you, and here I am talking about the technically oriented ones, the ones with a thin layer of mechanical pencil dust on your clothing—in a word, the geeks—may even want to plug your computer directly into the wall, thus allowing electricity to flow through it. In this case, you’ll also need to purchase a “program,” or “software,” which comes on a “floppy disk,” an object the size of a 45 RPM record such as “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” which we used to dance to at “record hops” back when Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was president.
Fortunately for you and the entire fitness movement in general, I have developed a special piece of fitness-oriented software called the “Dave Barry Total Diskette Workout Program.” The way it works is, you put it in the computer, which asks you to type in your name. Then you typ
e in your name, and the computer forgets it immediately because the truth is that the computer really doesn’t give a damn what your name is. It was just trying to be polite.
Next, the computer holds an Interactive Fitness Dialogue with you, wherein it elicits certain facts from you regarding your specific fitness situation, then it evaluates the facts and reports its findings, as follows:
COMPUTER: ENTER THE LAST TIME YOU ENGAGED IN A WORKOUT.
YOU: (Enter the last time you engaged in a workout, such as “just before Thanksgiving” or “World War II.”)
COMPUTER (thinks for a minute, and proceeds): SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU’VE DONE ALL THE WORKING OUT YOU NEED TO DO FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE. ALL WORKING OUT MAKES JACK A DULL BOY! HA HA! PLEASE ENTER A LIST OF THE FOODS YOU WOULD LIKE TO EAT TODAY.
YOU: (Enter a list consisting of no more than 100 foods which you would like to eat on that particular day.)
COMPUTER: I DON’T SEE ANY PROBLEM WITH THE FOODS YOU HAVE LISTED. HAVE A NICE DAY.
That’s all there is to it! In less than five minutes, you have accomplished, using a computer, a data-processing feat that would take 60,000 trained mathematicians 1.3 billion years to accomplish, and even longer if you let them go to the bathroom! And you will be pleased to learn that this program will also do your income taxes (“YES! YOU CAN DEDUCT THAT! I’M SURE OF IT!”).
Choosing the Right Place to Get Fit
Basically you have two options: your living room, or a fitness club. The advantage of getting fit in your living room is that it’s free and you can scratch yourself openly. The disadvantage is that your living room is where you keep your little dish of M&Ms for guests, which means you’ll actually gain roughly a pound of ugly fat for each week of your home fitness program.
So you should probably join a fitness club such as you see advertised in the newspapers by photographs of attractive models wearing leotards fashioned from a maximum of eight leotard molecules. Before you join such a club, you should take a tour conducted by one of the fit and muscular staff persons. This person will show you the various rooms and pieces of equipment, then hold your head under the whirlpool until you agree to buy a membership.
Here’s a useful checklist of the features a good fitness club should have:
A powerful odor of disinfectant Various species of hairs in the sinks Signs all over the place reminding you that the management is not responsible A loudspeaker system playing soothing musical numbers as performed by the Dentist’s Office Singers A door that says “WEIGHT ROOM” that you never venture through because large sweating men go in there and emit noises like oxen with severe intestinal disorders Two women in the sauna who are always there, no matter what hour of the day or night, talking loudly about growths in their pelvic regions
Saunas
The word “sauna” is Finnish for “very hot little room with strangers in it breathing funny,” and people who’ve tried it agree that it’s a very invigorating experience, provided you get out in time. If the door sticks or anything, you have about as much chance of survival as the unfortunate corals who happened to be residing on that reef where we detonated the original hydrogen bomb, because the usual temperature inside a sauna is 180 degrees, which you may recognize as the recommended final temperature for cooked turkeys, very few of which live to tell about it.
This high temperature is, of course, very good for you because your body contains traces of toxic minerals such as lead, which get in there when you get drunk and eat paint, and the heat helps you sweat them out. Really, I’m not making this up. Here’s a direct quote from Shape magazine, an authoritative journal:
“Sweating is now a significant route for eliminating trace elements from the body.”
So that’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that these trace elements have to go somewhere, presumably onto the sauna seat, which means if you use a spa sauna, you’re lounging around on a lot of other people’s trace elements.
So what I recommend is that you build your own sauna at home, which is a lot easier than you might think. All you need is a few simple hand tools. (No! I’m not going to tell you which ones! I’m sick of making all the decisions!)
Using your hand tools, construct a handcrafted little wooden room that has a bench inside it and a sign on the door that says “WARNING! REMOVE ALL CLOTHING AND JEWELRY AND DENTAL FILLINGS AND PACEMAKERS!” Now all you need is a way to raise the internal temperature to 180 degrees. You could always set fire to the sauna, of course, but then you’d have to handcraft a new one every time you wanted to use it, which would leave you with very little time in which to eliminate your elements. So I suggest that you take the more practical route, which is to plug in 40 toasters set to “medium brown.” They’ll give you all the heat you need, plus you’ll get a healthy aerobic workout clambering around in there trying to keep all the little levers pushed down. Keep the number of the Burn Unit handy.
Okay! Now you’ve bought your fitness outfits, you’ve found a place to do your workout, and you’ve built your own sauna. The only remaining question is ...
When to Actually Start Your Fitness Program
Not today, certainly. You’ve done enough today! I would rule tomorrow out, also, seeing as how it comes so soon after today. You rush into these things, and the next thing you know, you’ve strained a ligament or something. So I would say the best time to begin would be first thing after Easter, although not the one coming up.
Chapter 3. Women’s Total Complete Aerobic Fitness Workout
Warming Up
To understand the importance of warming up, let’s take a look inside a typical human muscle. As we can see, it’s very dark inside a typical human muscle. This means that most of the time the individual muscle cells are fast asleep. The purpose of your warm-up routine is to allow these cells to wake up gradually—to stretch, to scratch, to go to the bathroom, etc. If you just start jerking them around, they’re going to be very cranky, and they may develop a condition that professional medical doctors call a “Charley horse,” which is usually fatal.
WARM-UP NUMBER ONE:
CLEARING YOUR MIND OF WORRISOME THOUGHTS
You can’t loosen up effectively if you’re worried about nuclear war, or the likelihood that somebody might steal your wallet while you’re doing your exercise routine. So your initial warm-up step should be to lie down on your back with your knees bent and your feet planted 17 inches apart, then, with your left hand overlapping your right, clasp your wallet to your chest, raise your head to an angle of about 36 degrees Fahrenheit, and watch “Happy Days” or a similar television situation comedy rerun where they never talk about the likelihood of nuclear war. Hold this position until about a minute and a half before your neck develops a “crick,” which is usually fatal.
WARM-UP NUMBER TWO:
LETTING YOUR MUSCLES KNOW
YOU’RE ABOUT TO START MOVING
Lie facedown on your wallet with your legs together and your arms away from your body at an angle of about 7 degrees, then have a friend or hired servant place his or her face about an inch from your various major muscle groupings and say, in a pleasant, musical voice, “Everybody up! Time to start warming up for a Fitness Workout!” Then have your friend listen closely to your muscle groupings for the sound of good-natured cellular grumbling. If necessary, he or she should prod them very gently with the eraser of a number 2 pencil, such as you used on your college boards.
WARM-UP NUMBER THREE:
PUTTING A TAPE OF LOUD ROCK ‘N’ ROLL-TYPE
WORK-OUT MUSIC ON A GHETTO BLASTER-TYPE
STEREOPHONIC LISTENING DEVICE
One thing you have probably wondered about for many years is why musicians who sing rock ‘n’ roll tend to be extremely thin, if not actually dead, whereas those who sing, say, opera, tend to be humongous wads of cellulite. The reason for this phenomenon, scientists now believe, is that fat cells are actually destroyed by stupid lyrics. In one recent experiment, scientists at the University of Iowa reduced a
live 450-pound hog to an object the size of a harmonica in less than six hours by repeatedly playing the chorus to “Shake Your Groove Thing” at it. Other songs with proven fat-reduction lyrics that you’ll want to have on your workout tape are:
“My Baby Does the Hanky Panky”
“Yummy Yummy Yummy I’ve Got Love in My Tummy”
The verse of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” that refers to “figgy pudding”
Everything Barry Manilow ever wrote
“Ballad of the Green Berets”
“Da Doo Ron Ron”
“My Way”
To put your tape on your ghetto blaster, lie on your back with your legs about 14 inches apart and your wallet clamped in your left armpit, raise your right arm gradually until you can insert the workout tape into the ghetto blaster device, press the “play” button, then gradually return your arm to the floor and just lie there for a while, spent.
The Actual Workout
All warmed up? Great! Let’s start getting fit! Do each of the exercises below twice on the first day, 4 times the second day, 8 times the third day, and so on, each day doubling the previous day’s number until, after just two weeks, you’re doing each exercise over 1,000 times! And hemorrhaging internally!
So let’s get started!
EXERCISE NUMBER ONE:
LEG HEFT
Lie on your back, legs slightly spread, arms resting on the floor, palms down. Have an accomplice grasp you by your ankles and lift your legs about 18 inches then attempt to guess their combined weight.
