Cartoon Comfort
How this MF contributor got fit using WikiHow
I’ve never really been a tness person. If only I owned an armchair, I’d be the modern-day armchair fan, with streaming links aplenty and a hare-brained assumption that nerding out over fantasy football somehow makes you more susceptible to tness by osmosis. In truth, I love cricket on the radio, football on the telly and the Olympics on the sofa. Despite my talent for watching screens, I found myself immune to the charms of Joe Wicks. Maybe it’s my tendency to completely miss out on massive cultural moments, but his workout antics during lockdown
1.0 (which were literally designed to help people like me) completely passed me by.
I found myself in a rut after a series of unfortunate events. A surging run at
ve-a-side was met by a crunching late tackle, and an unfounded belief in the mystical healing powers of ‘running it o ’ put pay to any hopes of getting any long-distance running back on track.
en, a house-share of seven that was bound to result in a positive Covid test nally delivered in the middle of lockdown 2.0.
With the startling realisation that my daily commute had reduced a 20-minute walk to a mere tenpace slump, and facing 14 days of quarantine, I decided to give getting
t a try. With little outside contact, and only my laptop and the internet to rely on, I opened the Pandora’s box that is WikiHow.
USER-FRIENDLY FITNESS
I have a lot of time for WikiHow, precisely because I have spent a lot of time on WikiHow. It’s the resource for millennials facing daunting life tasks: tax, trigonometry and ‘how to show emotion’ sit side-byside. at a largely faceless website can be a perfect mix of agony aunt and Haynes manual is surely an indictment of our society in some way, but who needs cultural criticism when you can have the joy of WikiHow? e home for those questions that parents or education should have answered
a long time ago, but now you’re too old and/or embarrassed to ask. I wonder how many ‘birds and bees’ talks could be improved with one of their pallid instructional guides. It’s remarkably good for beginner tness activities, too – as I found out. e Wiki-authored guides feature instructional GIFs that teach you about muscles and movements, accompanied by short, undramatic bullet points of text. But it’s the cartoon instructors who really make it, and for good reason. I have a mostly irrational fear of gyms. I nd the unwritten rules and unfamiliar equipment scary, as well as the social pressure to try everything out. Holding up someone’s gym routine because of my own incompetence is my worst nightmare, save for actually getting over myself and letting one of the many lovely tness instructors help me.
SMOOTH OPERATORS
With WikiHow, there is none of that. e little cartoony people move so smoothly as to render them posthuman, like a video game that’s gone ‘too far the other way’. What’s more, they are all fully clothed, distancing them from a realm of tness videos aimed at absolute beginners but delivered by ripped experts. ere’s a Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a Gordon Ramsayesque gure challenges a struggling chef to a cook-o , only to be told that it’s not actually that helpful having a really good person show you how good they are at something – and for me that rings true in relation to tness. I like to imagine the androgynous cartoon people scuttle o home after appearing in the videos: to watch the telly, avoid the gym and hope that there might be some more ful lling opportunities ahead for them in 2021.
ey o er help that’s crucially bereft of a goal. My favourite thing about those little characters is how decidedly un- eshy they are. I never really realised how insecure I was about existing in my body until I Googled some very basic tness questions; I watched on startled and a little scared by the endless ripped bodies cluttering my targeted ads for the next week. To have a couple of physiologicallyandroidal gures helping me along was strangely comforting – it taught me to enjoy getting t on my own terms, without requiring a body goal.
ere came a point where I had to part company with the charming, if limited, WikiHow GIFs. I fancied challenging myself to do more. It doesn’t quite feel the same, and who knows if I’ll continue getting tter, but I know there’ll always be a place in my cardio-starved heart for the little animations who set me o on the right footing.
“WikiHow is remarkably good for beginner tness instructions”