I can see this bike from the spin bike, too

My name is Janet and I am a football addict.  I started watching casually when I was a kid because my dad watched.  And then I was in high school in the 80s and there were the great Niner teams.  Later on, I found that watching large men hit each other on Monday nights after work had a soothing (or maybe cathartic?) effect.  Later still, my boys started to watch with me.

There are many reasons why being a football addict might not be a good thing (glorification of violence, excessive valuation of athletic ability over character, wanton sacrifice of young men’s health for entertainment, rampant consumerism, brain cell loss from too many beer/truck commercials), but the one I want to focus on today is that games are long.  If we sit on our behinds on the couch for a three-hour broadcast, we are not doing ourselves any favors.  Getting up to get more snacks is not enough to keep us from being slugs.

I happen to have a spin bike in my living room near the TV.  I realize that not everyone thinks that all décor must include bikes of one kind or another.  I use the spin bike to keep myself from slugging out.  Yesterday, that meant that I did in fact watch the entire terrible spectacle of the Raider game, pedaling seated during the game and doing standing intervals during commercials.

Even without a spin bike, we can multitask our TV time.  Commercials make great intervals for pushups, squats, crunches, jacks, mountain climbers, and other body weight exercises, no equipment required.  Keep a couple of dumbbells around (they make great doorstops) and we can add lateral raises, curls, overhead presses, and the like.  Stepping also works if we can locate something sturdy enough to step up on (which is to say, not the glass coffee table, which is probably higher than we want to start with anyway).

When we use our imaginations, we can find all kinds of ways to sneak exercise into our lives and even make our guilty pleasures somewhat less guilty.