Working Out Together

My husband has, for the past four years, dedicated himself to a work-out routine in order to get fit (or in his case, more fit) and stay healthy. He gets up very early every day and completes various exercises, usually employing videos from YouTube. Often, I sleep through these videos, but during the covid months, I have also gotten up many a day to complete my own rigorous routine. My routine includes feeding the cats, brushing my teeth, starting a pot of coffee to brew, and posting an Instagram picture for my volunteer work.

               Okay, so it’s not rigorous, but I am faithful in completing the tasks. Meanwhile, my dearest one is out in the family room becoming even more gorgeous and using a number of techniques to achieve this purpose. As it turns out, I find that we have more in common than I thought.

               I mean, I never totally watched all the exercises that he did, but I can hear him and the video instructors from my perch. While the coffee brews and I surf the Instragram world, I get to sit in a big easy chair in the corner of our kitchen. This is how I heard some of the terms and it began to occur to me that he and I share many common interests.

               For example, I never hear “sit up,” “push up,” or “jumping jacks.” These dreaded things I know all too well from my school years as exercises I never want to repeat. But he doesn’t seem to do these.

               Last week, I heard the instructors telling him to do something at the bar club. Bar club? I’m all about that!  I meet my girlfriends once a month at a local emporium to enjoy half-priced drinks!  We’re not an official club, but it sounds right to me!

               Sunday night I cooked a big feast of mostly Mexican delights. It was tasty, but I totally understood Monday when I heard the television talking about “burpees.” Of course, it’s not the right season for the famous seeds, so I knew he must have tuned in to a specific video that would help relieve that bloated feeling from just one spoonful too many of refried beans.

               Then the next day, the video man was talking all about “dips.” I love dips. Bean dip, deviled ham dip, horseradish dip, guacamole…they’re all good. Technically, a cheese ball is a dip, right?  I could not believe that Matt’s fitness program included tips on such wonderful things!  The same day, I heard him do something called crunches. I can only assume these are the things that go with the dips – chips, crackers, pita pockets and the like. Yum!  Who knew that exercising could be so delightful?

               I heard the voice on the tape today talking about Romanian dead lifts and Bulgarian dead lifts. I am not really sure what these are, but they sounded an awful lot like the exchange students at my high school. I had a date with the guy from Bulgaria, and it pretty much was a dead lift.

Then I heard the voice say “Bulgarian split squat.”  That’s when I left my comfortable chair and walked into the family room to see what in the world they were doing with a banana split. Turns out – it had no ice cream, no banana, and no chocolate sauce. It had squat. So I guess that’s how they named it. And it did make me hungry, just thinking about a banana split.

               So I muscled up to the freezer, squatted down to the bottom shelf, and pulled out a Nestlé’s crunch bar.

               It’s gratifying to know we have so much in common in our retirement years!