Wednesday, April 09, 2008

"I shall triumph over human lethargy!"

I know, I know.

So many of you keep asking for my fitness secrets that I had to break down and spill the beans.

There is one book I consult when considering doing actual exercise:

How else can they parade around in Spandex all the time?
The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book.

Before I hit puberty and discovered that exercise shows were populated by girls in skimpy leotards, this was the coolest may to learn about exercising.

I used to check this book out of the library from time to time as a lad. Of course, the library's copy had additional artwork in it; some artist wannabe had seen fit to add explosive fart clouds to the figures where he thought necessary, which, from the look of it, was just about everywhere.

But fortunately, the copy I procured from eBay (eBay: Buy all the crap your parents wouldn't let you have as a kid!) suffered only from mild water damage.

I look at it now and am a bit skeptical as to the benefit of some of these exercises. I mean, look:

Who wears short shorts?

Leaping up and down may look cool when the Silver Surfer does it (if I were a bigger nerd, I might say he looked Radd, but I'm not, so I didn't), but I must have been doing something wrong, because I never got buffed doing it.

I worried that I might look like a moron doing these exercises, and they must have realized that, because look at Spider-Man performing The Little Miss Muffet.

Someone is just dying to post this pic of him out of context somewhere.

Poor Spidey. This is almost as embarrassing as Spider-Man 3. Still, I guess you burn some calories doing this. So like if you ate three Fritos and did this for an hour or so, you'd probably have burned off a third of those calories.

At a certain point it seemed like they ran out of ideas. Granted, this was written in 1976 before Olivia Newton-John invented aerobics or whatever, but what the hell is this supposed to accomplish?

Feel the burn.

WTF?

Coincidentally, many of you may be rolling your eyes right now, too. Medusa (of the Inhumans) also showed how to do jaw exercises (insert your own Lindsey Lohan joke here), chin-ups (where you press against your thumbs with your chin muscles--to prevent double chins), scalp pulls (I clearly did that one wrong), and the ever-so-difficult lying on a mildly inclined plane.

No, really.

So I don't know how beneficial the book is, but you wanted to know my beauty secrets, and here they are, revealed just for you, true believers!

Excelsior!

2 comments:

  1. This reminds me of the old book we discovered in the high school library that told us it was very important to get our daily allotment of vitamin D(?) from sunshine. So we took in upon ourselves to start laying in the sun at track practice every day to stay in tip-top condition!

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  2. Anonymous5:03 PM

    Wow, that book is simply amazing, I want one!

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