Workout Shorts

I’ve devised a new three-part daily wellness program to stay reasonably active and reasonably fit. I’ve named the three parts as follows: the Morning Louie, the Midday Meander, and the Evening Constitutional.

The last two are just walks. I take a 20-minute stroll around lunchtime and a 40-minute amble in the evening, for a daily total of one hour of perambulating time.

The Morning Louie is when I open the Apple Fitness+ app and follow a workout video led by one of the off-puttingly positive trainers. I call this regimen the Morning Louie ‘cause usage of the app was suggested to me by my husband’s friend Louie.

I was yammering on about how I dislike going to the gym, and Louie was like, Why don’t you just use Apple Fitness+ and your apartment building’s exercise room? And I was like, Sold.

I don’t think Louie himself even uses the app. If memory and his Instagram Stories serve, he’s a CrossFit person.

But he made a throwaway comment and now it’s his legacy. The same thing probably happened to Gary Coleman vis-à-vis “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis.”

According to the workout history section of the app, the exercise categories I turn to the most are Core, Strength, Treadmill, and HIIT. The remaining options are Yoga, Pilates, Dance, Kickboxing, Cycling, Rowing, and Meditation.

Beyond my usual standbys, I do the app’s Meditations pretty regularly, and I have also taken stabs at Yoga, Pilates, and Cycling sessions. But I don’t believe I have ever attempted one of the Dance, Kickboxing, or Rowing routines.

It seems like Rowing hardly ever comes up as an option on the homepage, and I feel like the era of Kickboxing has come and gone. Who am I, my older sister furiously punching the air in front of her in time to the exhortations of Billy Blanks on a Tae Bo VHS playing on the TV in the basement in 1998? It’s been done.

As for Dance, I have never been coordinated enough to follow choreography and I am certain that if I tried one of the app’s terpsichorean interludes I would contract a case of the giggles so severe I’d have to stop the workout. Actually, that sounds kind of fun and I should give it a go. Will report back.

While “taking my exercise,” as my grandmother would say, I wear a T-shirt and either my black workout pants or my gray workout shorts.

Otherwise, I hardly ever wear shorts. Somehow they just never look right on me.

My legs are like your third grade teacher. Remember how strangely unsettling it was when you’d spot her out and about, shopping for produce in the grocery store or buying a Frosty at Wendy’s? On some level, you always knew she wasn’t permanently confined to where you usually encountered her, but all the same it upset your little brain to catch glimpses of her unloosed.

My bare legs are like that. We all know they exist, but seeing them cha-cha in the open breeze makes us all feel that things have gone unpleasantly askew.

I only make exceptions for exercise—when I sometimes wear my fitness shorts—and for ultra-hot days when I have to be outside for extended periods in temperatures higher than 85 degrees.

If those conditions have not been met and yet you notice that I’m wearing shorts when we run into each other in the produce section, you have my permission to hit me with a “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis.”