I have a feeling I may simply have been standing, looking mournfully in the mirror side on with a handful of belly at the time. I’m thinking I probably mentioned something about getting fat and needing a bit more exercise next year too.
As a result of this mere utterance Mrs P swung into action.
I have to say I’m impressed. It was very much a throwaway line from what I recall but it obviously set a thought train in motion for her and she came up with the goods.
I know she starts laying hints about her own Christmas present somewhere around August and they don’t register with me till about December 12.
Even then I have to ask her to spell it out exactly what it is she wants and where I can get it. I’m useless at those cryptic message things.
Not Mrs P. She worked it all out and went and bought me what is know as an “ab (short for abdominals) board”.
The theory with my Christmas gift is you lift the board, which is basically a padded bench, to your desired height and/or level of incline and do all manner of exercises to give you the aforementioned six pack.
Easy.
Based on the pictures on the info sheet that came with it I would say by this time next week I’ll be trim taught and terrific all over, will look about 20 years of age and an equally impressive looking young lady in a bikini will be posing next to me as I work out with one of those “buy another one and I’ll deliver it personally” smiles.
Ah well. Such is life.
Naturally, I’ve set the thing up in the spare bedroom and had a go. Sort of.
Mrs P watched as I fixed my legs in place between these two foam rollers and laid back till I was virtually upside down.
Well, at least it felt like I was upside down. I was on enough of a slant that I could feel a bit of leftover trifle I’d had for breakfast that morning start to make its way back up my bowel to where it had come from.
As it turned out I was on perhaps a 15 degree slant which, for us exercise junkies, is perfect to, ahem, “optimise rapid core development”. That’s what the paperwork said. And all I needed to do is squeeze my stomach muscles and roll back up.
If you can remember the old sit-ups from PE at school, hands behind your head etc, it’s a variation on that except these days someone has decided you don’t need to go the whole way up. You can just squeeze your stomach muscles and go a bit up.
To be honest, as I was squeezing, it got a bit difficult to work out where exactly my core was.
I told my brain to focus on it but it just did its own thing and squeezed my bum, my calves, my thighs and just about everything else. I can only assume in my breathless state of oxygen deprivation my core got squeezed somewhere in there too.
So while all this was squeezing was going on I tried to roll my spine up into a one-movement curl.
I could see the logic in it. Curl up and squeeze at the same time. There would be no option for the abdominal muscles to ditch the flab and come together in a pack. The six-pack that is.
Somewhere among all this squeezing and curling there was a bit of laughter (from Mrs P) and another noise which cannot be mentioned in polite company. Needless to say it led to more laughter from Mrs P who was subsequently banned from the bedroom for the rest of the workout.
As I sat there contemplating the difficulty of the first exercise and the fact there were six more “core optimisation techniques” to master, I started to wonder why I actually needed the ab board in the first place.
Maybe I could just squeeze my core instead.
Actually, if I got really good at it I could just squeeze all the time. At work, in the car, sitting eating tea, even while writing this column each week. It would be a lot easier than trying to squeeze my abdominal muscles and curling my spine at the same time as laying on this board.
Maybe I’ll stop and think about it for a week or so.
In the meantime, I need to make some space in the bedroom.
Luckily the board folds in two and there’s just enough room for me to squeeze it under the bed where it can stay till I decide.
