A hundred push-ups no sweat with feline trainer

Let’s get it over with is Rab’s approach to exercise. Having tried all the gizmos in the gym, he’s found getting down on the floor while working from home is the answer to meeting his fitness targets

Ihave been doing push-ups. Yes, that made you spit your porridge across the room and all over the budgie. Like many decent ratepayers, I try to keep myself fit by reading articles about such matters and thinking long and hard about them. I can do 10 or 15 brain sit-ups quite easily though, even then, need to have a nap afterwards.

Waddling up the suburban hill keeps me fairly lithe but, recently, I’ve felt in danger of going to seed.

I haven’t been to the gym for years and, to be honest, don’t look much different than when I used to go three or four times a week.

I suppose the various pieces of HeathRobinson equipment kept my joints oiled or something, but there was never much to see in terms of effect on the physique.

As for losing weight, you only do that by eating less. You can jog from here to Timbuktu and lose nothing. The only solution is to have just two pies instead of the usual three for lunch.

Here at Swanky Towers, my friends’ house where I’m occasionally employed as a cat-nanny, there’s an exercise bike, cross-trainer, dumbbells and some kind of big ball on which presumably you’re meant to wobble around.

There’s also a trampoline upon which, as I understand it, one is meant to go up and, subsequently after a small period of thought, doon.

I gave it a shot and, predictably, went up, doon and off.

Not as easy as it looks and, of course, my lack of spatial sense did not lend itself to proceedings.

I’d a shot of all these gizmos but, in the end, got it into my head that, instead of wobbling aboot or bouncing up, doon and into wardrobes, I would do 100 push-ups a day. Sounds a lot – but it ain’t.

Everyone takes the same basic approach to exercise: let’s get it over with. So, you start off with 10 and think: “I could do another 10 now. That would help to get it over with.” Then you do another 20. And, the next thing, you’re done before lunchtime.

Luckily, being unemployable by proper enterprises, I work from home and so can get down on the floor for some flab-fighting fitness any time.

Not so easy if you’re a pilot, bus driver or supermarket till jockey, I imagine.

I don’t think I could keep fit if I had to work in an office all day and have to exercise in the evening.

It’s not so easy doing push-ups with a beer in one hand and your oven chips salad in the other.

I must say that having a cat on the premises doesn’t help matters. Bertie goes nuts with affection when you lie down at his level and, thus, has a habit of sticking his coupon into mine every time I do a push-up.

It’s very annoying because it causes me to lose count. So I go 7, 8 … 19, 20 … 28. See? Hundred push-ups: no sweat.

Perhaps, soon, I could push the daily target up to 200.

That really does sound a lot. But, with stern self-discipline and an interfering cat, I do not believe it to be beyond the bounds of possibility.