Listen to Your Body: It Says Don't Exercise
So you have set off on a journey, a journey that takes you through proper nutrition, proper attitude, and especially the thing itself: proper physical exercise.
Congratulations!
It is what we are built for, after all.
For all our higher properties of mind and spirit we are also sure-footed mammals, ever ready in our ancestral past to flee predators, leap from crag to crag, and chase down that evening’s meal.
But today’s sedentary lifestyle doesn’t allow for that kind of exertion, and it is starting to show up in the numbers displayed on the bathroom scale, the snugness of your pants around the waist, the huffing and puffing that results from a simple trot up the stairs at the office.
You have work to do, my friend.
Your mind is set to make improvements – really, the most important step – and those around you can see the change in you in your nutrition choices, your quiet satisfaction, and frankly, your new can-do attitude.
Nutrition and attitude will take you only so far however. They must be accompanied by exertion, the engine that drives all these self-improvements.
We here at the Poindexter Institute have found that the best way forward is to join an exercise class at the local gymnasium.
The class may have to do with dumbbells, it may have to do with jump ropes, it may have to do with running around the block outside the gym. In a way the specific exercise doesn’t really matter, the whole point is to get moving.
It is not unusual for newcomers to stroll into a gym, fully dressed in their workout clothes, and find themselves in the company of veteran fellow athletes, many of whom seem to live there.
Wander among them for a while and see how determined they are, and how passionate.
Try not to be put off by the fierce light in their eyes, a light that some might call nuttiness of some variety or other. This only shows you the level of their commitment.
It’s a funny thing, but by way of all this wandering around, in a sequence that largely resembles the scrambled logic of a dream, you suddenly find yourself on the gym floor surrounded by the members of the group. There’s a teacher in front and he’s giving out instructions.
You had meant only to mix with these fine people and at most test the flexibility of the flooring underneath your feet in case you ever took up jump roping or the like, and lookee here, you ended up in an actual class.
Funny!
As mentioned, it doesn’t matter whether the class involves calisthenics, running in place, weight lifting, or a set of the exercises that you see in old movies that shape up raw recruits in boot camp for landings upon enemy shores. In the latter case sprawling coils of barbed wire and live ammo zinging just over the top of you head add to the immersive effects.
No, what matters is that you listen to your body. It is the final arbiter determining your level of exertion, and unless you are listening to it you will never know how your body is actually responding to the stress you are putting it through.
Take note now and again as to where you are in your levels of perceived exertion, it will help you gain your fitness goals.
Level 1. I feel great! This is exactly what I have been needing for some time. It is as though a surge of energy is flowing through me and I am responding to the world at a physical level. This must be what they mean when they talk about ‘runners’ high.’
Of course class hasn’t started yet.
Level 2. Now class has started, for real this time. This isn’t so hard! I can keep this up for any number of minutes. Here I go. This isn’t so hard.
Yes it is.
Level 3. What have I gotten myself into anyway?
This thing is playing out like one of those Greek tragedies where the main guy makes one mistake – one lousy mistake! – and pays for it mightily all night long before the curtain finally comes down. All I did – my one mistake, one for crying out loud – was to wander into this gym.
Level 4. I wonder how many levels of exertion there are anyway? My sparse memory of Euclidean mathematics suggests that there is an infinite number. Sounds about right the way things are going.
It is a good guess that there will at least be as many levels as there are Circles in Dante’s Hell.
Level 5. Do they keep count of the people who have died in class? That would be interesting to know. What do they do with them?
Maybe the rest of the class gathers in solemn silence and sends my body out to sea in a flaming ship like the Vikings are said to do. Whatever. It would be better than this.
Level 6. Let’s see, we did the estate planning and prepared a will last summer with the family lawyer, so all that should still be good, the children will be well taken care off after I’m gone.
Level 7. What is an estate anyway, and what’s a lawyer? For that matter what are children?
Level 8. The thought comes to me, and it is not a pleasant one, that I am a man and if worse comes to worst, I must die in place.
The women can get by stopping to adjust their leggings or to place two fingers against that spot on their necks to test a pulse, but I have no leggings, and I suspect at this point that I have no pulse.
If I quit I would immediately be seen through and my fellow exercisers, who in their furthest reaches of exertion now bear a marked resemblance to a pack of demons, would likely stone me to death.
Level 9. Well, time is passing at least.
See that clock on the wall? It tells me that since I last glanced at it and resolved to simply put my head down and see it through one way or the other —just solider on through! putting the quarter hours behind me — a full three and a half seconds have passed.
Level 10. I am dead now, speaking from The Underworld, and what is left of me on the exercise floor is like something you’d see at a séance, a kind of ectoplasmic presence. I speak only in this spooky echoey voice.
Level 11. As it turns out you can die in The Underworld too, just like up here, so not only have I died once by way of this embrace of physical fitness, I have, unusually, died twice, and gone to the Under-Underworld. In the space of a few minutes on the gym floor I have occupied three separate domains of existence, two of them including death of one sort or another.
Level 12. Speaking of death, I think reflectively at this stage of exertion of all my fellow beings through history, and think especially of those who were consumed when asteroids suddenly impacted the earth or dinosaurs swooped down their mighty jaws and just ate them. Lucky devils! Some guys get all the breaks!
Finally, class is over.
You return by degrees from the various levels of The Under-Underworld and then from the good old plain jane Underworld proper, the latter of which looks like a comfortable suburb compared to the Under-Under place. I never wish to visit there again.
This return to plain old life is a bit like having parked in the lowest layer of a parking garage downtown, down there where I have seen hulking sub-human figures slouching along, digging for precious metals for the perfectly weirdo gods of their belief system, and then slowly driving up into the light.
My fellow athletes congratulate me on my spirited endurance, and I say, ‘oh, it’s nothing.’
Standing there, smiling to myself with a quiet satisfaction new to me, I vow to never ever engage in any kind of physical exercise again for the rest of my life.
