Twin Cities - Cleaning and Fitness

I must go back to the gym.

That is what is always trending in January.  The gym is where people use all kinds of steel and iron gadgets to get rid of the food they consumed in December and call to order rude extra flesh.

However, fitness centres cannot fix what is caused by a chosen lifestyle.  Granted, office workers are chained to their desks for seven or eight hours.  They have no choice but to drive to the gym after work to bend and crouch, to get the blood flowing again.

A chosen lifestyle might be sitting on the couch eating food that becomes a tenant of the waistline, addiction to certain TV shows, crunching potato chips while playing video games the whole day, always drinking soda that loves to inherit certain parts of your body and not bending to pick up anything.

Bend and crouch.  That is what a workout is all about.  Bend and crouch. To get a clearer meaning of these twin words, check out some ads for cleaning offices, homes, hotels and anything else cleaned by people we call, the less privileged.

Senators, members of parliament, software developers and nuclear physicists have no reason to look at cleaning jobs, but they do, if they are fitness crazy in search of the perfectly sculptured body.

Cleaning jobs have a warning: the task involves bending and crouching and other repeated body motions.  You don’t make up your own bed, so you don’t know the advantages of making 20 beds a day.  It is repetitive work.  If that is not working out in the gym, I don’t know what is.  That is why most cleaners look trim.  

They sweep, collect dust, throw it in the trash can and mop.  The mop is the ultimate workout: swish, swash and press the water out.  It is all systematic and every cleaner has a unique way of doing it.  You never look at them when you are waiting in line for your take-out curry, smoothie or fish and chips.  You avoid eye contact when you see them cleaning the mall.
That is why you don’t believe that it is exercise.  But think of their arms.  They are not like Michelle Obama’s, but they are like yours, the product of weight lifting.  Window cleaning skyscrapers does not have bending and crouching for obvious reasons, but it is repetitive work, a great advantage for the arms.  You have never seen an obese window cleaner, have you?

There are many causes for obesity.  Not cleaning your house is one of them.  If you are married to a couch via an electronic screen, be it television, computer or cellphone at an early age, you are bound to be obese. Forget about mopping floor tiles.  It never crosses your mind because someone cleans your room including the toilet.

The home is everything, including a fitness centre.  There is a lot of bending and crouching to keep it clean and pleasant for everyone. Taking obese 13-year-olds to the gym does not solve the problem, because the missing limb will always be there, which is basic skills to keep what we call home clean.  It will catch up with them in college and love affairs.
By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.