Ten Tonne Tubby Timmy

Ten tonne tubby Timmy

After a summer diet consisting pretty much exclusively of whisky and protein I now resemble the character Greed in gory chucklefest Se7en. There are now two alternatives for me – I can either be tortured to death by a particularly inventive serial killer named John Doe, or I can cut out the whisky and do a bit more exercise.

After giving it some thought, and consulting with my wife, I’m going to go for the latter option.

The main problem with this is that I’m really not much into working out. The main flaws are that it’s boring, sweaty and time-consuming. Also in Scotland it’s not very nice outside after mid-September. And exercise hurts. Oh, and did I mention it’s as boring as hell?

I’m not a team player type of person and so the chances of me joining some sort of exercise or keep-fit club are next to zero. After all, if I wanted to spend a lot of time in a small room with a bunch of sweating, hairy men I would go to a Turkish prison.

So to try and combat these problems I’ve taken the effort to clean out our garage and turn it into a sort of pseudo-gymnasium. The effort of doing this left me puffed out and sweating like stalker focusing his night-vision goggles on an unsuspecting neighbour. Anyway, it’s given me more than enough room to put my bike up on its roller-wheel thing and I’ve set up an old set of speakers so I can connect up my MP3 player to provide phat choons (as I believe the young people of today call the Hit Parade).

So that takes care of the legs, but what about the top-half? After a considerable amount of research on the Intermaweb (about three minutes in reality) I came across “Shovelglove – the Sledgehammer Workout“.

Essentially the Shovelglove exercise regime consists of making “useful” movements with a bloody great sledgehammer. These useful movements consist of things like churning butter, chopping a tree down or driving in fence posts. As the author points out these movements are silly; but no sillier than, say, riding a non-moving bike or climbing a set of imaginary stairs in a gym.

I also quite like the concept of doing only 14 minutes of the regime at a time. The reason for this is that no calendar, such as Outlook, has an appointment period of less than 15 minutes – therefore at 14 minutes the session is the equivalent of no time at all.

The most important thing, however, seems to be the naming of your sledgehammer. After a quick look on godchecker.com and I had settled on “Magni the Mighty“. Rrrraaaagh! Prepare yourselves for the new slimline Timmy!