Sunday, January 20, 2008

Better Abdominals through Death and Semiresurrection

Death, I gather from horror movies, is a remarkably transformative experience, even an improving one. Or at least, semiresurrection is.

On the Buffy and Angel television shows (of beloved memory, curse the networks involved for not extending both to infinity), those who were killed and came back to life as vampires gained impressive martial-arts skills in the process.

That's uncommon. What does seem to be common, though, is reanimated corpses gaining the ability to perform a smooth, easy straight-leg situp while lying on a gurney, covered with a sheet, and with no one holding their feet down!

Now, I've been doing leg lifts for years. Okay, not regularly. Not even often. But never mind that. My abdominals are okay but far from great, and they're covered by a layer of, er, beer converted to manly flesh. I don't think I could do that kind of situp even with someone holding down my ankles. (And if I were on a gurney and covered by a sheet, I'd be too freaked out to try. Especially if there were hands gripping my ankles.)

So I guess leg lifts aren't the answer. But I don't know about getting myself killed by a supernatural creature and then being resurrected, gurney, sheet, etc. It seems a bit extreme. Especially since all the resurrected critters get to do is terrify a living character by grabbing her (almost always her) shoulder and mumbling something vague and enigmatic and significant. It's true that the shoulder almost always belong to a major babe, but even that's not really enough, considering that the resurrected critter, despite the great abs, returns limply to being dead shortly after the shoulder grabbing and mumbling.

I'll stick to leg lifts.

2 comments:

Lahdeedah said...

Well.

Have you done the Roman Chair yet?

That is torture. I bet vamps would do it one handed.

I keep looking for Buffy reruns and can never find them. I've actually given up and started a story about um, vamnps and it's a lot of fun. You'll be happy to know, they don't gain any martial arts skills.

Or even athletic prowess.

Hmm.that might be too dull.

As for regular exercise,... tell me, in ten degree weather, what do you do for cardio? Because I sure as heck-n-crap was not going to run this morning in oh ten degrees....

David said...

Those chairs look like torture. Just looking at pictures of them is enough for me. One of our benches has handles on that you can hold onto and do leg lifts and dips, so I do that and feel virtuous.

I don't do cardio. I've always hated it, even though I know I ought to do it. I used to bicycle and walk outside a lot, and then I switched to a stationary bike, and then to a treadmill. Nowadays, I walk a few miles a day to and from the bus stop at both ends of the commute, carrying a heavy briefcase with a laptop inside it, uphill. It really is uphill in the morning. So I've convinced myself that that's enough.

Coming home this evening, the temperature was -50 degrees and the wind was around 150 mph, making for a windchill of -750 degrees. Well, that's how it felt.