I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

I must admit, I try and do sit-ups from time to time. I don't really expect to have hard-chiseled abs at any point in my life, but it still feels like I'm doing something productive with the thick middle part of my body.

Whenever I'm at Fike, I now do a short workout on the rowing machine there, which happens to be in "ab central." This it the area that is always jam packed with Clemson girls toning their abs to perfection. It's also no coincidence that the best ab machine at Fike is always taken: men and women (although the latter to a much greater degree) are obsessed with abs.

So I leave you all with an interesting article in the NYtimes that brought about this reflection.

"Remember how the hitchhiker in "There's Something About Mary" was talking about making a fortune by going eight-minute abs one better with seven-minute abs? Thanks to an arms-race mentality within the abs industrial complex, we have cycled past six-minute abs and three-minute abs to, yes, six-second abs, which is an "as seen on TV" contraption, which looks like a small vacuum cleaner that has sprouted antennae.

The new approach seems more grown up. Fantasies of a Brad Pitt washboard (Kate Bosworth's in "Blue Crush" might be the female ideal) still inspire some younger absaholics, but particularly among baby boomers lurching through their 50's abs mania can mean another way of forestalling the creaks of an aging body.

"It used to be this huge aesthetic push, how ripped can you be?" said Chris Imbo, a personal trainer in New York. "It was the classic six-pack everyone was chasing after. That was something that was a hard reach for most people.""

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