Who Needs a Gym When you have a Wife?

With tongue slightly in cheek, I have added some new exercises to my toolbox. Wife Bent Over Rows, Wife Chest Press and Wife Squats and Wife Deadlift. The videos are below.

Yesterday morning I was gripped with the desire to do some exercise, no doubt something to do with the sack load of calories I had consumed the night before.

If you read my last post you will know I have committed to a one-a-week strength program with only one other session that's intense but essentially not about strength. In other words, it still allows my muscles to continue their recovery from the strength day. So since I was not allowed to do a session, I lay there thinking about exercise instead.

I have recently convinced Mrs M to do her own once or twice-weekly exercise session - simple circuits that involve basic bodyweight exercises like press ups, squats, jumping jacks and crunches. She also uses a chair to do rudimentary deadlifts. This Paleo diet has her losing weight hand over fist and I have explained that unless she also adopts more Paleo activity patterns she'll end up with ancestral fat content but modern muscle content - not an outcome she relishes.

As I mentally did handstand push ups against the wall and tried to think of an easier equivalent for Mrs M to do, it suddenly hit me - a novel solution to the hotel-room workout problem: use your partner.

I'm not saying I am the first person to come up with this idea - but I bet most of the time this kind of thing is done in exercise classes in schools or gyms rather. I wonder how many people have used it to solve the problem of an absence of weight lifting equipment and a wife who'd rather spend an extra 15 minutes in bed.

So here are some videos. Clearly Mrs M is not getting a particularly intense workout here, but in most cases she is having to maintain rigidity (isometric muscle contraction) and use a variety of muscles.