1 week Ago By By The Newsroom
Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Lancashire Evening Post, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. OK, so they may well have meant investing in the stock market (notwithstanding the last week of the Donald Trump horror show) but it also covers getting and staying fit, and in particular stretching muscles in your back and legs that you never knew you had. Me and The Boss now attend a weekly exercise session together at one of our city’s finest gyms that we call “Stretchy Class”.
It does have a far fancier official name, but that’s what it’s called in our house. Advertisement Advertisement It turns out that there are many kinds of fitness. Just because you can power a spin bike like Lance Armstrong in his chemical brothers heyday, it means diddly squat when you’re on a yoga mat in a class full of people with the flexibility of cats while you’re clunking around like an IKEA flat pack wardrobe.
But it’s good to try new things, especially when your adult kids have grown and flown. After all, you can only walk the dog so far every day and you’ll eventually run out of episodes of Married At First Sight Australia to watch (like rats fighting to the death in a sack - honestly, I could happily watch a 24-hour live feed. Weirdly compelling).
Maybe this is what keeps relationships going through the years? Grunting and groaning on a blue rubber mat, a few feet apart, while trying desperately not to catch each other’s eye while contorted like a pretzel, for that way lies a fit of the giggles. Anyway, after every class we always say the same thing, sometimes to the instructor, “I wish I’d done this 30 years ago.” Who’d have thought that sitting around for hours on end on a sports desk of a national newspaper for 15 years, watching endless football and eating packets of biscuits, crisps and chocolate bars would have an adverse affect on your health? Not me.
Until it did. Advertisement Advertisement Like 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy said when he grew an inch and a half through sheer willpower, me and The Boss leave the class every week feeling like someone has gently gone over us with a giant rolling pin. Loose, light and all stretched out.
Of course, exercise without a decent diet is pretty much pointless. But thanks to The Boss’ eight months of the Human Being Diet (loads of fresh veg, fish and eggs) the scoreboard (scales) takes care of itself. We say to ourselves, why didn’t we do this in our 20s? Probably because bars and nightclubs were open, we spent too much time at work, then raised kids, while paying back loans for stupid stuff we didn’t need and certainly couldn’t afford.
If I could hop in a time machine and go back to the long, hot summer of 1995 and find yours truly propping up the bar of The Alex, I’d say this. Put that pint down and go to this new class they call Pilates a couple of times a week. It will save you decades of back trouble that a 25-year-old me couldn’t even begin to imagine.
To read more Who’s The Daddy click here.
