The Ugly Side of Exercise

I don't know about you, Reader, but I've been feeling a bit ragey this week. Moody, furious, tearful, depressed and very, very angry. Lockdown is taking its toll, as is the clock change - always a bit jet-lag-inducing at the best of times and this is not the best of times!
We all know that exercise is good for us, especially when it comes to counteracting rage, but is it really so good? When you think about exercise, do you think about a svelte, serene woman doing tree pose (Vrikshasana)? 

Me and my bestie, doing Yoga in simpler times...

Or some hench guy doing speedy press ups as effortlessly as a cat, batting a plastic ball on a string?

What about the rest of us sweaty proletarians, lumbering around in an ungainly manner? Not so shiny and pretty now, is it?

I won’t lie to you, friends, my sports bra heralds from leaner, sportier times. Times when I used to go running and do aerobics classes and, gasp, belonged to a gym! Circumferences have changed over the years, I haven’t seen fit to get measured for a new sports bra, because, until recently, the most athletic thing I've done these days is walk up some stairs at work. However, now I've started to leap around in the mornings to Joe Wicks, I find that I have to wear that ancient piece of restrictive lingerie (the sports bra) and it leaves an ugly red ridge around my torso. It cuts in something chronic but I can’t not wear one - wearing a normal bra means that the aerodynamics are all wrong. I won’t go into details other than it proved too distracting for the other poor members of my family, so the next day I turned up in full gear - running shorts, singlet and armour plated, ugliest-garment-in-the-history-of-garments, sports bra. 

But it’s not about what I looked like, right, it’s about how the exercise made me feel. And how did it make me feel? On the first day, brilliant. Subsequent days, quite good but perhaps not so good and also quite ashamed - ashamed of being terrible at squats and push-ups and planks, but also entertaining the rather optimistic hope of coming out the end of it as a master of all these things - the plank queen! All hail The Queen of Planks!!

Green Eyed monster

We need to talk about ‘Just Dance’, ‘Let’s Dance’, ‘Time to dance’ or whatever the bland, forgettable name of this game (on the PS 4 and many other platforms) is. It should be the most fun thing ever and it sort of is. Sort of.  But it also isn’t and, for me, this is because of the competitive element of it. Dearest reader, something strange has happened - my husband, who I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is not an amazing dancer*, is really good at ‘Just Dance’ and keeps beating me at it. It’s not that I mind being beaten (much) it’s more that I just want to enjoy the music and move without being judged on how well I’m completing the moves. Just let me dance, Just Dance, just let me dance!
* Update - he does mind me saying!

It’s not just that though, that’s not my only niggle. As I sat there the other night, watching a play on my laptop, like the true intellectual I am, my husband wiggled his neat, compact little bottom to a Shania Twain song, right in front of me. 

Husband - getting his groove on!

Oh no, I thought, he’s going to emerge at the end of this period of isolation, social distancing, whatever, looking all buff and hot and hench and I am going to look like the librarian from the Blade film franchise!

Day 91 of self-isolation

He’s leaving me behind! This just will not do. This is the true ugly side of exercise, the unattractive, insecure, competitive side of it! 

Try it at your peril.