Dorky Dad Fitness
I enjoy watching exercise and fitness videos on YouTube so I figured I’d make my own. I work full time and have a family so I have to figure out how to fit exercise into a busy schedule. More than half of my workouts involve my kids in some way. I built a pull up bar and parallel bars in my front yard so I exercise at home outside while looking after them. Or, often I’ll take them to an indoor trampoline park, or to an outdoor park with a jungle gym, or go roller skating or to jiu-jitsu or some other activity. Sometimes they even ride their bikes with me on my runs.
Larry Wall, the author of the Perl programming language, once promoted the value of laziness for computer programmers. He explains that programmers seek to make people’s lives easier by creating labor-saving programs. I agree with Larry and I dig most of his ideas. I actually even met him one time and thanked him for making Perl because it had greatly benefited my career. One of my former bosses once told me, “Doctors will do anything so they don’t have to do anything.” I love this attitude and am not bound by the constraints of needing to be any sort of authority in the area of exercise. Because I’m somewhat lazy, I want to do as little exercise as possible and get the maximum results. If I could get away with it, I would work out really hard just once a year. But since it doesn’t work that way, I end up exercising two or three times a week. I even keep a big calendar poster in my garage where I keep track of what workouts I do, and when, so I don’t do them too close together. I wouldn’t want to “overtrain”, you see.
I once read an essay on something called “functional fitness”. The author talked about how instead of trying to build big muscles, you’d be better off having a good level of fitness in all sorts of activities: running, jumping, lifting, crouching etc. – like the kind that will soon be needed for the impending zombie apocalypse. Since I’m a fan of vampire and zombie movies, this is definitely up my alley.
To survive when the undead attempt to take over my city, I need to be able to:
- Kick down doors
- Pull myself up onto rooves
- Balance while walking on ledges
- Move heavy things out of the way
- Jump over fences
- Punch zombies in the face
- Shoot vampires with a shotgun while running
- Sprint away from zombies chasing me
- Dodge attacking zombies – like dodging a tackle while running for a touchdown in football
- Run long distances if necessary
- Wield weapons (Unfortunately, jiu-jitsu doesn’t work on vampires and zombies.)
- Throw and catch stuff
- Fit into tight spaces
- Do the limbo like the character Neo does in The Matrix movie to dodge bullets
I try to prioritize weight training and then choose one or two other things for the week – usually jiu-jitsu and something else like roller skating, yoga, running, juggling, indoor trampoline parks or whatever happens to be the most convenient.
To be truthful, much of my exercise motivation comes from simple vanity. I like the way I look and feel when I exercise regularly and eat correctly. I like being trim rather than flabby. It’s also true that I’d rather eat snacks and desserts multiple times a day. I’d love to constantly be eating Snickers and Twix bars and all my favorite chocolate truffles. I’d love to become a connoisseur of baking brownies and chocolate chip cookies! I love rocky road ice cream and drinking beer every day! I also love cereal and chocolate donuts! I’m sure I’m much healthier because I don’t usually eat those things but it’s not because I don’t want to. I do want to but I usually abstain because of the effects on my health and physique. I guess a little bit of vanity goes a long way.
For fun, I had my son take videos of me with my phone while I was exercising. I combined this with some photos into this video so you can see what a real-life dorky dad looks like in full exercise action. I apologize for filming the video in portrait mode. Future videos will be in landscape.
As a postscript, it may be worth considering some laziness as a virtue in exercise. I’ve long held the suspicion that most people either exercise too little or too much. This article promotes the idea that, for strength training, once a week is completely sufficient and more than that leads to diminishing returns for all but the most determined exercisers.
