The unmotivated workout
My nerdy love of the art of persuasion gets me to sweat on command.
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I’m not a sports guy. I don’t even like watching sports. (Why pay to see other people exercise?) When I was a kid, my three siblings reasonably called me “fat baby.” My mother would throw me out of the house in the afternoons to “get some exercise,” and I’d smuggle out some comic books and read them sitting on a log in the woods.
The scientific name for my genetic body type might be gumbymorph, except that Gumby is flexible and I’m limber as Tin Man. My preferred “activity” is reading a book with a cat on my lap, except when I’m too tired to hold up a book. Then I stream movies, with a cat on my lap.
So don’t take this post as bragging. Just know that I utterly lack discipline. I eat like a pig and drink like, well, a drinker. Plus I turn 70 in a couple months, an age that equals a handicap.
First swim of the season in Orange Pond, NH, April 29. It felt like jumping into a well-shaken martini.
I’ll put the exercise part in a footnote1. That way you won’t hate me before we get to the useful rhetoric. Just remember: I got fit thanks to the strangely awesome art of self-manipulation. It can also help you in ways that have nothing to do with fitness.
A raft of rhetorical tools went into building my workout habit, and they’re all described in my new book. Here are some of the tools that helped me most:
Framing
Don’t think of the exercise, think of the time. It’s my time, based on my own time zone. It’s the time I listen to audiobooks (while I’m, you know, exercising), and as the time I’m not working. Framing is one of the most interesting, and powerful, tools of rhetoric. For some of the basics, see these posts.
Choicelessness
I floss every evening before bed, a tedious and disgusting chore that I’ve been performing with such regularity that during my bachelor days my lush, plump gums caused a young gumphiliac dental hygienist to hit on me. I don’t decide to floss at night; I just do. It’s a habit. As Aristotle pointed out, habits remove choice (though he probably didn’t floss, poor man). I treat my daily resistance and cardio routine the same way I floss, only with the added benefit of audiobooks. Here’s a TikTok post I did on flossing and workouts. (It’s terrible. TikTok just makes me feel old.)
The Lure & Ramp
I adapted this from Aristotle’s theory of habits. Did my routine blossom fully formed like Aphrodite on a seashell? No it did not. I first carved the time, by removing a useless evening hour and grafting it onto early morning. I called this new time Jaylight Savings, because why not? This was my hour to use however I wanted. I first spent it reading with a cat on my lap. Eventually, I began stretching while listening to an audiobook. Stretching turned into easy runs, which turned into video workouts, which became my own custom resistance sets. The Lure got me past my natural Gumby-with-a-gut state.
The Ramp? An effortless beginning, gradually ratcheting up the effort.
Actually, the original Lure was more ambitious. I wanted to overcome a crippling hip problem and become the first person over 50 to run his age up New Hampshire’s Mount Moosilauke. That crazy, stupid, pointless goal would test all the tools of persuasion. Did I succeed? Do you care? At any rate, that’s covered in my book. Meanwhile, I give a taste in this post.
Hyperbole
It’s the gaudy emperor of tropes. Hyperbole (Greek for “throw beyond”) got me to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that I could be an bona fide grade-A geezer athlete. It’ll get you cooking haute cuisine, busking on a street in Istanbul, chatting in Esperanto with Japanese intellectuals, writing a blockbuster screenplay without a single Marvel character; or something equally mighty and hyperbolic.
The Paean
Originally a god, it’s the most underrated, and powerful, figure of speech. My most recent post covers this.
Why write about self-persuasion in the first place? I’m hoping it will seduce more people into studying the original art of persuasion. Rhetoric created western civilization; and rhetoric can save it.
This routine took several years and a ton of rhetoric to get here. But it’s now a habit, like flossing.
After I finish writing this post, I’ll do a circuit-training dumbbell workout comprising 10 sets of bench press, one-arm row, overhead press, triceps kickback, and ab-wheel extended plank, burning about 700 calories in an hour and a half.
Yesterday I did an 8-set cardio routine with each set consisting of weighted walking lunges and squats, a minute jumping rope, and a minute of farmer’s carry with a pair of 50-pound dumbbells. After those sets, I did ten minutes of rowing on an erg. 700 more calories.
The day before, I did a similar workout comprising nine sets of pullups, crush press/flyes, lateral raise, incline biceps curl, and bar hangs raising feet to the bar. Another 700 calories.
Tomorrow I plan to speed-hike up our local mountain, 4.63 miles with 1,624 feet of elevation. Weirdly, I burn fewer calories on this one, which shows that circuit-style resistance training can have a great cardio component.
This Saturday I’m taking a rowing lesson on the Connecticut River with an 8-person shell.
As the summer progresses, I’ll replace one of those weekly resistance workouts with a long hike or trail run in New Hampshire’s high peaks, along with paddleboarding, canoeing, and trail building. Which aren’t habits but just fun, thanks to all the habitual exercise that preceded them.
