How do we look so amazing all the time?

Barely a day goes by without someone asking us how we manage to stay fit despite our prodigious gluttony. Yes, even in Oxford, where you’d think they are too brainy to notice. As with eating styles, we have tried it all before: weight lifting, yoga (Laurel; John never managed it), tennis (ditto in the reverse), cycling, running. We’re also big fans of sitting around and hoping for the best. We have always been up for anything that did not require actual physical coordination. Aside from health and aesthetic reasons, we have a practical goal: with our limited wardrobe it is important to remain roughly the same size all of the time. And so, for the very first time we reveal to you our top-secret regime for exercise on the go. We created this fool-proof system over years of grudgingly going to gyms and perfected it during an involuntary pandemic.

Our failsafe plan comes in four easy steps, and we recommend following it whenever your waistband gets a bit tight:

Fitness on the road

• Lots and lots of walking: having no car means that we walk everywhere. Sometimes (a lot of the time) we carry books or bottles of wine, which is good for the deltoids and/or the biceps, depending on whether you put them in a pack or in a shoulder bag.
• We take a long walk, about ninety minutes, every day, which also helps us to get to know the place we are living. Sometimes we take very long (five or six hours long) walks, usually to a place with food. (Motivation is important.) Sometimes we rent cycles. When we do, we tend to spend the day on them, averaging twenty miles or more.
• At least twice a week we use our handy little TRX system, bought many years ago on a whim. It hangs from a door and there are a variety of arm and leg exercises available online. We concentrate on upper body, four each session with two sets of minute-long reps and a rest in between. That’s sixteen minutes total, using what is known in the lingo as ‘working in’ each other’s sets. We have used this system in hotels across the world, with great success. Even in fancy modern hotel rooms without any door to speak of. Our current door setup is a bit cramped, so we end up hanging dangerously over a flight of stairs when we do side planks or pec flies, but that just pumps up the adrenaline. (See above for a photo, complete with bannister, taken from the staircase.)
• At least twice a week we use You Are Your Own Gym (battered paperback now replaced by e-book!) by Mark Lauren, who is a total badass. Laurel learned about bodyweight exercises years ago from a personal trainer, when she was seeking not to have a personal trainer. And we’ve been hooked ever since. He divides exercises into push, pull, legs, and core, which we have found helpful in conceptualising exercise as a whole. Here as well we concentrate on upper body exercises (push and pull), though we are usually without anything resembling a pullup bar. That said, his idea of throwing a towel over the top of a door works better than you’d imagine! Exercises range from 12 to 36 minutes a session, and they leave you exhausted by the end. We do some core, and talk a lot about leg exercises. But they leave us really sore for days afterward, which cramps our style (get it?).

In Sum…

Basically, we aim to do one of these things every day. We also stretch, morning and evening (two different sets of stretches). There you have it: our easy, soon-to-be patented plan for staying slim whilst we eat ourselves silly. You may also have noticed, in the photo above, an inflatable exercise ball, which we take everywhere not only because it is useful to stretch out your back, but because rental flats often do not have a single comfortable chair, and this works in a pinch, especially if you are working on a computer.