Exercise

Daily writing prompt

What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?

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OK, how many sets of some obscure exercise can you do? How about Hawaiian pushups? I was fooling; I thought I’d made that up and Googled it, and there is something with that name. There are all sorts of ways to torture your body into fitness. Some are even fun, I understand.

Or you could come to my house and help me stack two cords of wood for the stove. You will be disheveled, sweaty, and speckled with bark and sawdust in about an hour. But you’ve exercised every muscle and joint. In front of you stands a neat stack of wood that shows you what you have achieved.

My wood guy was busy with the landscaping part of his business and never delivered the last two cords of wood until this Friday. If he’d brought the wood any later in the month, he’d have been dropping it off in front of the Christmas Carolers. Of course, there was no help available to stack the wood. I was alone and stacked a cord daily. 

Everyone begged off helping, citing the rush to finish Christmas shopping, setting up the Tree, or other excuses. Many of these people will be groaning about needing gym memberships in a few weeks. They’ll pinch an inch of fat at the waist, complain of inactivity over the holidays, talk about all the rich food, and laud the punishment about to be inflicted by Ruth, the personal trainer at the gym.

They’ll do this while drinking my coffee and warming themselves before my woodstove. All the while blathering on about how wood heats you three times: when you cut it, stack it, and burn it. Of course, these same people were unavailable to burn fat off by stacking wood two weeks prior. But now they are moaning about how they need more exercise.

Our society has some weird disconnect between exercise and useful labor. You’ll pay gym fees, sweat, and pull muscles, but do not perform labor that achieves the same purpose. There seems to be a discreet separation, and I can’t help but wonder if it has to do with a disregard for physical labor. Physical labor is not valued, but time spent in spandex at the gym is.

This January will be different. My friend Jeff and I are working with a local gym on a new exercise system. We call it the Staxx Challange. There will be a giant jumble of 18-inch wooden rounds, each of different weights and thicknesses. The challenge is to stack them to measurements on the gym’s wall. Neatness counts. A convenient table estimates how many calories you burn and which muscle system you use and congratulates you on completing the Staxx Challenge.

After we franchise the system, my buddy and I will be rich. There is something very fulfilling in doing well while doing good!