So Their Workouts Are Wacky — So What?

The biggest excuse to avoid exercise is: “I don’t have enough time.” The second most common excuse is boredom.

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Enter the ever-inventive world of fitness, where there’s always something new to get you moving … Read on.

They Did What? 
“The most wacky thing I’ve tried was slathering Vicks Vapo-Rub on my thighs and abdomen, wrapping them with Saran Wrap, and donning exercise gear to hit the treadmill,” Nicole Grays Owens, of Atlanta, Georgia, told LifeZette. “The result? A gooey mess afterwards and wasted product. I did it repeatedly… and didn’t lose an inch.”

Michael Rigby of Schuyler, Virginia, calls himself the Kung Fu Gardener. At age 52, he realized he loved gardening and wanted to do it as long as possible, but age was catching up to him. That led him to combine gardening with the martial arts.

“I want to garden for as long as I’m physically able,” Rigby said. “I use the foundations of a Kung Fu system as an exercise routine that I can practice while I’m gardening. All of the same techniques for breathing, stances, even weapons basics, transfer readily to the most human activity that we engage in every day.”

How Stimulating!
Daniel Nyiri, of the Tampa area in Florida, said full-body electric muscle stimulation workouts are the wackiest of workouts currently gaining momentum for 2017. He’s taking a shot at helping others by offering to “stimulate” clients at four locations in Florida. Participants strap on special clothing embedded with electrical stimulators. (Sounds a little like the 1950s, when people strapped themselves in conveyor-like belts that promised to rub off flab.)

Get to the Beach
Perhaps you’re oceanside in David and Minna Herskowitz’s Sandbox Fitness studios in Sherman Oaks and Los Angeles, California — where they offer indoor “beach” workouts. Working out in sand, they claim, is easier on the joints. The sand can also provide resistance, making it naturally harder to run, walk, and jump. The studios offer yoga, surfboarding, TRX, and other common exercise modalities, all done in a big indoor sandbox. No sunscreen necessary!

Hit the Drums
“Pound fitness” involves — get ready for this one — just you and a set of drumsticks. Participants in pound classes literally hit the floor with drumsticks while moving, apparently attempting to distract themselves from the fact that they’re exercising their arms while making the drumsticks move.

Anything Goes
San Francisco has a reputation for creative workouts. Just listen to these possibilities: vintage baseball using 1886 rules (you must call the umpire “sir”!); underwater hockey; lightsaber combat; bike polo; baritsu (martial arts while dressed like Sherlock Holmes); trampoline dodgeball; Quidditch (the game Harry Potter plays — bring your broomstick); and Poi fire dancing. That’s dancing with fire, in case it’s not clear.

Also, in San Francisco, Kim “Skipper” Corbin founded a movement to get people skipping — the kind without a rope.

“Some people find the fact that a grown adult skips down the street very wacky, though I believe we need more positive energy, and it is wackier to judge anyone who is contributing positive energy to the world,” Corbin told LifeZette.

She said skipping burns twice as many calories as walking, has less impact than running, and makes you feel like a kid again.

Since founding the “iskip movement” in 1999, she has skipped all over the world. “Skipathons,” like the one held in Austin, Texas, last October, are — well, marathons for skippers.

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In graduate school, Dr. Shaun Wehle, a psychologist, personal trainer, and health coach in the Chicagoland area, created a workout video in jest. In the video, he used his own children as weights to demonstrate a resistance training exercise routine. He called this “the crazy uncle workout” — like that crazy uncle who threw you in the air and (hopefully) caught you when you were a kid.

While Wehle made his video to be humorous, he suggests that getting moving no matter how wacky is critical.  

Related: Exercise So Your Brain Won’t Shrink

If avoiding boredom is the purpose — some of these workouts may do the trick for you.

Pat Barone, MCC, is a professional credentialed coach and author of the Own Every Bite! bodycentric re-education program for mindful and intuitive eating, who helps clients heal food addictions.