It will probably come as a shock to absolutely no one that I have never had a gym membership. This is partly because I'm cheap and partly because, frankly, I'm not that into exercise. I wouldn't call myself sedentary, but I like to keep my physical activity low-key. I have my dance practice once a week, and I go for long walks—around an hour a day, weather permitting, which I combine with running any errands I need to take care of in town. And until a few years ago, that was it.
As fitness routines go, this was okay for cardio, but pretty short on strength and flexibility. And the older I got, the more I started hearing about how important it is to include some strength training in your routine so your muscles don't shrivel up and die. (The word the articles typically use is "atrophy," but that basically means "shrivel up and die.") And when COVID hit in 2020 and I found myself stuck at home with plenty of extra time on my hands, I decided to start doing the 7-Minute Workout.
In case you've never heard of this routine, it's just a sequence of a dozen exercises that you can do at home with no equipment except a sturdy chair, such as push-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. You do each exercise for just 30 seconds before moving on to the next one, working out each part of your body in turn. Serious fitness buffs say that to get a real workout, you should go through the whole rotation multiple times, but I made up my mind at the outset that I wasn't going to listen to them. I knew I could convince myself to spend 7 minutes a day sweating and panting, but if I tried to force myself to stick with it for 14 or 21 minutes, I'd start skipping it because I was too busy, too tired, too depressed, et cetera. The way I figured it, a 7-minute workout I'd actually do was better than a 14- or 21-minute workout I'd keep meaning to do.
I must know myself pretty well, because I have indeed stuck with this routine for the past five years, only only occasionally skipping a day due to illness, injury, or lack of time. Over the years, I have made a few minor modifications to the routine. I do the exercises in a different order, building up from the ones I find a bit easier to the harder ones. I've also switched out the crunches and the forward plank, which seemed to aggravate my notalgia paresthetica, for reverse planks, which are supposed to help with it. After reading an article that lauded the one-leg rise as one of the most beneficial exercises for older adults, I subbed it in for the wall sit, which I'd always found somewhere between painful and boring. And I've tacked on a series of stretches to the end of the routine—some for my legs, some for my back. So it's now more like 15 minutes in total, but only 7 minutes of the real high-intensity stuff.
Another advantage of this workout is that I can do it at any time of the year, rain or shine. The same doesn't hold true for walking, which is still my main form of exercise. I manage to fit in a walk most days, but sometimes it's just too cold, too hot, too wet, or too windy. I didn't realize just how often I was skipping or curtailing my daily walk until I signed up last fall for CashWalk, a little app that rewards you for your daily steps with points that you can cash in for gift cards. (In order to claim your points, you also have to view ads, because that's how the app gets the money to pay you with, but you don't have to pay attention to them.) There were a surprising number of days I didn't even hit the 6,000-step mark—and while that's partly because the app only counts steps I take while carrying my phone, and partly because the phone is cranky and sometimes fails to record steps properly, I knew I couldn't blame it entirely on that.
So this year, as one of my New Year's resolutions, I vowed that I would get at least a modest 49,000 steps per week, regardless of the weather. The first day it was too cold to walk outside, I tried walking indoors instead, doing laps around our big downstairs room while carrying my phone. This got boring pretty fast, so I started amusing myself by watching YouTube videos on the phone while walking. That made it more fun, but unfortunately, holding the phone steady so I could see the videos interfered with its pedometer function. I'd watch a 5-minute video, all the while walking at a pace of at least 100 steps per minute, and then pull up the app to find that it had recorded less than 100 steps total.
Eventually, it occurred to me that I should just watch the videos on my office computer instead while walking in place in front of it. When I do it this way, either holding the phone in my hand or sticking it in my pocket, I get a pretty accurate count of my steps. I can trot in place at a rate of around 180 steps per minute, so it only takes me about 40 minutes—two longish videos or five to six short ones—to get in my daily steps.
This "walk and watch" routine is at least as good a workout as walking on a treadmill at a gym, and a lot less hassle. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to wait my turn for a machine, and I get to watch whatever I want while I do it. (My favorites include SciShow, Good Mythical Morning, The Icing Artist, various scam-baiters, and clips from Taskmaster.) And best of all, I'm actually earning a few bucks a month for my efforts with my handy app instead of shelling out $10 to $100 per month to a gym. After all, if I'm the one putting in the work, why should I have to pay someone else for it?