ANNOUNCER: The handoff goes to Burger; he’s tackled at the six. ... Uh oh! He’s hurt!
COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like a knee injury, Bob, from the way that bone there is sticking out of his knee.
ANNOUNCER: Burger’s teammates are bending over him. ... Uh oh! Now they’re down on the field!
COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like they’ve all injured their knees, too, Bob.
ANNOUNCER: Here comes the team physician, who is. ... Uh oh! Now he’s down on the ...
So one of the things we’re going to stress in our fitness program is knee safety. We’re going to get you so aware of this important topic that you won’t even discuss racquetball over the telephone without first putting on knee braces the size of industrial turbines.
The Digestive System
Your digestive system is your body’s Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter. You must be careful about what you eat, unless you want your body making heart valves out of things like bean dip.
The Central Nervous System
The central nervous system is your body’s Messenger, always letting your brain know what’s going on elsewhere in your body. “Your nose itches!” it tells your brain. Or, “Your foot is falling asleep!!” Or, “You’re hungry!!!” All day long, your brain hears messages like these, thousands of them, hour after hour, until finally it deliberately rests your hand on a red-hot stove just for the pleasure of hearing your nervous system scream in pain.
Your Respiratory System
Your respiratory system takes in oxygen and gives off carbon monoxide, a deadly gas, by a process called “photosynthesis.” This takes place in your lungs, yam-shaped organs in your chest containing millions of tiny little air sacs, called “Bernice.” In a normal person, these sacs are healthy and pink, whereas in smokers they have the wretched, soot-stained, anguished look of the people fleeing Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. This has led many noted medical researchers to conclude that smoking is unhealthy, but we must weigh this against the fact that most of the people in cigarette advertisements are generally horse-riding, helicopter-flying hunks of major-league manhood, whereas your noted medical researchers tend to be pasty little wimps of the variety that you routinely held upside down over the toilet in junior high school.
The Circulatory System
This is, of course, your heart, a fist-sized muscle in your chest with a two-inch-thick layer of greasy fat clinging to it consisting of every Milky Way you ever ate. Your heart’s job is to pump your blood, which appears to be nothing more than a red liquid but which, according to biologists (this should come as no surprise), is actually teeming with millions of organisms, some of them with tentacles so they can teem more efficiently.
The only organisms that actually belong in your blood are the red cells and the white cells. The red cells are your body’s Room Service, carrying tiny particles of food and oxygen to the other organs, which snork them up without so much as a “thank you.” The only reward the red cells get is iron in the form of prunes, which the other cells don’t want anyway. If you don’t eat enough prunes, your red cells get tired—a condition doctors call “tired blood”—and you have to lie down and watch “All My Children.”
The white cells are your body’s House Detectives. Most of the time they lounge around the bloodstream, telling jokes and forming the occasional cyst. But they swing into action the instant your body is invaded by one of the many enemy organisms that can get into your bloodstream, these being bacteria, viruses, rotifers, conifers, parameciums, cholesterol, tiny little lockjaw germs that dwell on the ends of all sharp objects, antacids, riboflavin, and the plague. As soon as the white cells spot one of these, they drop whatever they’re doing and pursue it on a wild and often hilarious chase through your various organs, which sometimes results in damage to innocent tissue. Eventually they catch the invader and tie its tentacles behind its back with antibodies, which are the body’s Handcuffs, and deport it via the bowel.
Of course this is just a brief rundown on your various organs and systems; in the short space I have here, it’s very difficult for me to explain all of your body’s complexities and subtleties in any detail, or even get any facts right. For more information, I suggest you attend Harvard Medical School, which I believe is in Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, let’s turn the page and really get started on our fitness program! Or at least limber up.
Chapter 2. Getting Ready To Get Started
One of the most exciting aspects of getting into fitness is that you get to wear modern fitness-oriented clothing, clothing that makes a statement to the world around you. “Look,” it states, “I have purchased some fitness-oriented clothing.”
Up until about 15 years ago, the only fitness clothing available for men was the plain grey sweat suit, which we fitness experts now recognize as totally inadequate in terms of retail markup. Fitness wear for females consisted of those high-school gym outfits colored Digestive Enzyme Green; there was no fitness clothing available at all for adult women, because the only forms of exercise deemed appropriate for them were labor and driving station wagons.
As the fitness craze developed, however, all kinds of “active sportswear” became available from famous designers who think nothing of putting their names on your clothing, but who would have the servants set the dogs on you if you ever tried to put your name on their clothing. Today it’s not uncommon for people to wear their active sportswear to the shopping mall, to work, to the opera, to state funerals, etc. Recently, an attorney argued a major case before the U.S. Supreme Court while wearing a puce jogging outfit! The justices didn’t seem to mind at all, although this could also have been partly because they had fallen asleep.
The point is, you want to choose your fitness-program clothing carefully because chances are you’ll be wearing it to do much more than just exercise. In fact, you’ll probably be wearing it to do everything but exercise, since there is growing medical evidence that exercise can make you tired and sweaty, as we’ll see in later chapters.
The Basic Fitness Fashion Look for Women
This is, of course, the leotard and tights, which is the preferred outfit because it shows every bodily flaw a woman has, no matter how minute, so that a woman who, disguised in her street clothes, looks like Victoria Principal will, when she puts on her leotard, transform herself into Bertha the Amazing Land Whale. This encourages her to exercise vigorously and watch what she eats. She cannot, of course, drink anything, as there is no way to go to the bathroom in a leotard and tights.