Slackers embrace sofa sports
There’s a lot of pressure to keep your resolutions, and a month into the new year many people have already left those goals in the rearview mirror.
But not Torben Bertram. Fed up with colleagues who kept pressuring him to join workout sessions during his lunch break, the 39-year-old Berliner founded Germany’s first couch potato club.
Bertram says his Sofa Sports Association is proudly geared toward the non-vegan, non-overachieving, non-career-obsessed masses.
“I just didn’t like this constant pressure to improve myself,” Bertram said, adding he is the antithesis of many young people in Berlin: skinny, well-groomed but stressed.
Club activities include swaying back and forth, like in a beer hall; the “Tarzan yell” — beating your chest with your fists and yelling; and the potato chip competition, consisting of eating chips out of a plastic cup without using one’s hands — a favourite among the club’s child members.
The club has been meeting for about a year at bars and pubs in the German capital and now boasts 25 members from eight to 64 years old. Men, women and children are all welcome. Bert ram’ s wife initially thought sofa sports was “nonsense ”— but she joined anyway, Bertram said with a smug smile.
The father of two, who works in political communications, sports a goatee and has a penchant for cycling shirts that are too tight around the belly. He speaks with eyes full of mischief, suggesting one shouldn’t take everything he says at face value.
Lounging on a worn-out couch at one of his favourite bars in Berlin, Bertram said the club only meets in bars with sofas, where everyone is encouraged to participate in the club’s unique fitness program.
The association’s “sofa exercises” aren’t just bar games, Bertram said with a deadpan expression. Some strengthen back and arm muscles, or burn calories.
The beer-hall sway, for example, is said to combine popular German traditions with eastern-Asian forms of body awareness including elements from the Chinese Qigong system of body co-ordination.
“We are no regular couch potatoes because we’re not idling away our time in front of the TV ,” he said. “We’ve put some serious thought into this.”
It was the traditional beer-mug hoisting that convinced Patricia Bernreuther to join the club.
“It’s really just a variety of what we’ve been doing in Bavaria for generations,” the 28-year-old par- liamentary aide said while holding a heavy glass of beer in her outstretched hand with ease.
“It makes me feel like I’m back home.”
Unlike southern Germans, who competitively carry more than 20 mugs at the same time, the Berliners are satisfied to exercise with one glass at a time, at a sloth-like speed. Most importantly, sessions are fun.
Norbert Buddendick, a 50-yearold lobbyist, said the couch potato meetings are much more fulfilling than his previous workouts at the gym.
“Ilikethewhole-bodyapproach,” he said, tongue-in-cheek, as he ordered another glass of wheat beer. “And it’ s really great to ming le with like-minded people.”