From the President, 1221 WYBJ, Vol. 44 No. 6. 8
| Author | J. Kenneth Barbe, J. |
| Position | Vol. 44 6 Pg. 8 |
Want to Feel Better? Then Move!
J. Kenneth Barbe, J.
Welborn Sullivan Meck & Tooley, P.C. Casper, Wyoming
Research shows that getting exercise can lift your mood, enhance creativity, and improve your physical health. But who has time to go to the gym? I sure don’t. I mean, get in the car, drive to the gym, park, go inside, say hi to the people I know. Do the workout. And then after the workout it’s the same routine in reverse. I could spend 30 minutes or more on workout mobilization before I even break a sweat. In the meantime, there’s the brief, contract, trust, call, home/personal commitments, or fill-in-the-blank that needs my attention. Believe me, I’ve tried to make a workout part of my routine. For a while, I tried the gym first thing in the morning. But then on cold, snowy days I was generally able to talk myself into skipping. It wasn’t long before excuses kept me out of the gym.
A workout buddy, someone to make me accountable, that’s what I needed. So a friend and I started going to the gym over the noon hour. But if he had to skip a day, I would too. And there seemed to constantly be some reason that he or I could not leave the office to go work out. Ten my friend moved out of town and that was the end of that. I also tried an evening workout—either stopping on the way home from work or going home for dinner and then out again to work out. Nope, that didn’t work either.
My wife has always been health conscious. She’s a registered dietitian. She tells me that healthy eating is only part of the equation for good health. Activity, at least five days a week, is ideal. But her approach to working out was different than mine. She had what I called her “jumpy-skippy tapes” that she would pop in the VCR. I’ll confess that on more than one occasion when I came home from work, burnt out, while she was doing one of her workouts in the living room, I drank a lemonade (or maybe it was a beer … I don’t remember) and sat on the couch until she finished. She encouraged me to join in but doing jumpy-skippy was really the last thing I wanted to do when I got home. And besides, jumpy-skippy was not even a real workout. Right? I mean, there was no equipment involved other than the occasional hand weights, and how could you really do a “workout” in your living room?
Once I agreed to give it a try, I immediately realized that my wife was doing a real...
To continue reading
Request your trial