The number of times I needed to exercise but wouldn’t have summoned up the get-started energy without Delia joining in with me: TOO MANY TO COUNT.
This week it’s been this ten-minute seated cardio workout:
I’m overweight to the point where I can’t run or do other stuff that actually elevates my heart rate without it really hurting my feet, ankles, knees and hips, but I’m still in good enough shape that walks (unless they’re straight up a hill) don’t give me enough of a cardio challenge. So! Seated cardio workouts like this are really effective and manageable additions to walks.
I love guided exercise programs, AND I really love “easy” routines designed for older people or people with limited mobility or just any of us who want to do *something* more than nothing, but not wind up in pain or just suffering through something we can barely follow along with for an hour. Five or ten minutes of *something* is great, and the payoff is always surprisingly noticeable (for me) and greater than the investment. Even then though, it’s so much more encouraging and fun when my wife joins me and — even though she’s much more athletic than I am — says it’s really helping her, too.
We don’t have room inside for both of us to do it, so I bring my laptop out to the backyard and set it up on a little plastic folding table, and we carry chairs outside, and the whole neighborhood can hear Coach Nicole tell us what to do while I gasp for breath and my whole mouth spasms while doing seated “jumping” jacks. For real. I don’t know why, but my whole mouth does this strange flex-grimace each time I “jump”. It’s not the kind of thing you want someone you’re courting to see.
I don’t want to say this is strictly a married-and-been-together-for-twenty-years activity because this is TOTALLY shit you should be able to enjoy with anybody you like spending time with, but it is just way super cooler when it is your life-partner and your self-consciousness is only a tiny percentage of what it would be with anybody else in the whole wide world. And the bigger issue to me is how important but still pretty rare it is to invest time and effort in your health as part of your relationship. It ranks up their with housework on the list of super-important high-priority activities-that-are-NOT-sex but you want/need your partner(s) to routinely DO, either with you, or as much as you.
The way my wife has always been not only willing to do ANY DORKY-ASS EXERCISE shit, but also HAPPY to do it with me (and happy to initiate exercise activities, and PATIENT with me, and also determined to do exercise shit herself whether I want to or not) is one of the big things I admire, love, enjoy and value about Delia and being married to her.