At the risk of implying a connection: since the 1970s, an unprecedented number of Americans A) work in offices and B) are overweight. Your great-grandfather ate pork bellies six days a week, spent his afternoons hacking at weeds with a scythe and maintained a healthy weight. You have fat-free yogurt and organic kale, spend eight hours a day flipping between Facebook and Excel spreadsheets, and are in mortal danger of becoming a mound of gelatin.
Modern life is a conspiracy to make you fat. Ask the 66% of Americans who are medically overweight or obese. Some of them are milkshake addicts who last got off the couch to change the batteries in the remote, but most of them are like you: normal, busy people whose jobs happen to require them to spend 40 hours of your week sitting motionless in a chair.
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A precision machine for making your ass bigger
That chair is a symbol of what’s wrong with America’s asses, but like any symbol it can be repurposed. Your office chair is secretly an exercise machine—an awkward, wobbly machine that shoots out from under you when you least expect it, but a machine nonetheless. The following exercises are simple, but they’re enough to keep your blood moving and your muscles twitching during an otherwise motionless day at work. Best of all, you can do them with just your hated chair.
Bent rows
Stand facing your chair. Bend at your waist and grab the arms of the chair; keeping your abs tight, your arms slightly bent and your back straight, lift the chair off the ground and return. Shoot for 20 reps.
Full extension on the ab roll. Imagine a swivel chair instead of a little wheel, a cubicle instead of a yoga studio, and khakis instead of creepy black spandex.
Ab roll outs
Make sure that A) you have a rolling chair and B) no one can see you. Get on your hands and knees in front of the chair and grip it at its base. With your knees together, push the chair forward until your arms and torso are full extended, then roll back. 30 reps.
Dips
Remember how you made sure you had a rolling chair? Brace it against something, lest “chair dips” become a concept you have to explain to the guy who puts your shoulder back in its socket. Put both hands on the arms of your chair and raise yourself off the seat. Slowly lower until your elbow are bent 90 degrees, then return. 20 reps.
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Be sure to maintain an expression of eerie concentration.
Single-leg lifts
Sit up in your chair and extend your right leg straight forward. Keeping your back straight, raise your leg off the seat and hold for ten seconds. Harder than it sounds—20 reps for each leg.
Wide-angle pushups
Brace the back of your chair against the wall or your desk and stand facing it. With your feet together approximately four feet from the chair, put one hand on each armrest and lean forward into a pushup, keeping your back straight and your butt forward. 20 reps.
Dan Brooks writes about politics, consumer culture and lying at Combat!
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