exercise and tv - the old fashioned way

exercise and tv - the old fashioned way

Remember TVs without remote controls?

I had a memory flashback today - back to when I was a kid in elementary school.

I grew up with one brother and two sisters, all very close in age, and we would get home from school about an hour before our Mom got home from work. The standing deal was: "as long as everything was cleaned up and put away, we could watch TV until she got home."

This was great, except it wasn't. We had 4 kids and 1 TV, and no one ever wanted to watch the same show. Oh yeah, and our big, 19" set didn't have a remote control. This meant you could only change the channel by getting to the TV - or more appropriately, whoever could get to the TV could select the channel..

Thus began our afternoon ritual of "Battle Royale", where each of us would fight our way to the channel-changer, only to then have to defend his show against three others who were fighting to change the channel to something else!

Maybe I'm being a bit too myopic, but I don't think my kids are getting the same level of exercise from "watching TV" that I did when I was their age... I think I'm going to start tackling them whenever they change the channel! :)

the takeaway

I'm sure you watch more TV than you should - we all do, right? Why not add a little movement to your down-time? From now on, pretend you don't have a remote. Get up & move around whenever you change the channel - stretch, walk around the room, anything to get off the couch.

And don't even get me started on commercials - they're just begging for you to crank out 20 jumping jacks and 10 push-ups!

-Chris Butterworth

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