A Facebook friend recently shared a Sunday Times article about middle-aged middle-class women who are hell-bent on exiting the lockdown with defined abs. I haven’t read the article for two reasons: 1) it was behind a paywall and 2) I was afraid it would hit too close to home. There is no denying I’m spending significant portions of my week strengthening my core. And I have a hunch that these ab-obsessed women do not come out of that article very well.

Exercise is generally considered a good thing. That said, people tend to get suspicious if you are doing too much of it. What qualifies as too much of course varies. I know people who are fine with walking or running, but see any visit to a gym as a sign of a worrying mental condition; I also know people who work out every single day and complete triathlons. To my own astonishment, these days I’m closer to (although definitely not in) the latter camp. During the lockdown, I have been doing resistance training three times a week, boxing twice a week, stretching pretty much every day (once a week with a physio, otherwise on my own), as well as usually getting those daily 10 000 steps done. I train with my trainers via FaceTime early in the morning and go for a walk usually late in the evening, when there are less people about.

I am saying all this not to brag (as we have established, all that exercise may not be considered a good thing), but to give you an idea what level of physical activity we are talking about. Whether you define this as obsessive or barely adequate is of course up to you. Personally, I’m starting to think it is somewhat obsessive, as I honestly cannot imagine stopping. I NEED to do it. And that’s of course the question. Why does one need it? Some reasons are clearly considered more honourable than others, so let’s start with the more socially acceptable ones.

So far, I’ve been handling the lockdown relatively well, I think I have only snapped at my family for absolutely no reason twice during the entire thing and there have been only a couple of days where I’ve felt seriously sad and demotivated. While I’m definitely not more productive at work than I usually am, I’m also not much worse. I firmly believe this is partly because I have been doing all those Turkish get-ups, one-legged hamstring curls, one-two-one-twos, massively awkward stretching poses and looooong evening walks. Human beings have not been designed to spend weeks on end scooped inside, immobile. I feel myself getting anxious when I haven’t done anything physical on a given day. If during ‘normal’ times exercise gives you extra energy and an additional dose of endorphins, in confinement I think one needs exercise just to reach the baseline, to be functional at all. It’s maintenance and mental hygiene.

For me, it’s maintenance also in other ways. I had been training about a year and a half when the virus hit and I really wasn’t interested in going back to square one after all the work I had put in. I’m sure my strength isn’t quite what it was (even I understand that trying to do 100kg deadlifts at home is not the greatest idea), but it’s certainly better than it would have been if I had stopped entirely. When it comes to cardio, I’m probably in a better shape than I was two months ago. If you are one of those people who simply enjoy the process of exercise, I salute you. I, however, like to get better and seriously dislike getting worse at something. There is also the additional element of one thing leading to another: you start with weights, but then realise you should also improve your endurance and add some cardio, and as you’d like to improve both, you increase the number of sessions, which leads you to being somewhat stiff most of the time and therefore adding stretching to your repertoire…

Now, coming to the less worthy reasons, there’s the food. If one keeps eating as much as one usually does, but stops moving, well – the laws of physics dictate that one will put on weight. Weight has never been a major issue for me, but I love to eat and I don’t like to restrict myself. It’s not that I eat bags of crisps or mountains of cookies every day; in fact, I have been eating a pretty decent diet during the lockdown, getting my veggies and fruits and protein. (Plus an occasional cake.) But if I had stopped exercising or even done my usual amount, that would certainly have led to noticeable weight gain. When I’m working at home, I drag my body from one room to another a couple of times, but that’s it. If I want to keep eating my loaded sweet potato fries and date cake, there needs to be something to balance that.

And finally, the abs. We are not supposed to train for vanity, of course. Or if we do, we should at least never admit it to anyone, because that’s just not done. But frankly, it is quite nice to have visible abs and if that works as a motivation for you, I’m not judging. It kinda works for me, but in a roundabout way. While I have been obsessed with many things in the course of my 40 years on Earth, abs are not among them. I’ve never had much of a waist and I had totally accepted that this wasn’t one of my strong points (I have a broad upper body and that’s something you cannot change, no matter how much you train or diet). When the abs suddenly appeared as a side-effect of my workouts, I was pleasantly surprised, but still relatively indifferent. It was never my goal and I almost didn’t notice the improvement until it was pointed out to me. What has happened, however, is that now that I have them, I’m quite keen to keep them. So indeed, I intend to exit the lockdown with a core of steel and if the Sunday Times wants to get in touch, they are welcome to do so.

How is it for you? Are you moving more/less/the same? Do you have a routine? Is it fun or a drag?

PS I’m wearing my Lucas Hugh gym clothes that I think look great, but constantly make me worry that I’m not in good enough shape to wear them. Putting them on is a workout in itself.