I need this – to get fit fast – and Anna “Not Ryder” Richardson says she has the hacks to help me. Ah yes, that type of hack. Not a rough chop, or a journalist, or a computer break-in, but a time-saving strategy.
Eighty percent of us have failed our new year’s resolutions by February apparently, so that now we probably can’t even remember what they were. Something to do with the gym perhaps, eating better, drinking less? Luckily, Anna and her co-host, Amar Latif, are here to get us back on track, and fast.
First, body-weight training, also known as calisthenics, which has been around since Jane Fonda in the 1980s and, before even that, in ancient Greece. It’s back on trend. There are 4m #calisthenics posts on Instagram alone. “It’s like you’re hacking your body to turn it into its own gym,” says one ripped calisthenicist. (Hack is a verb as well, although whether or not calisthenicist is a word, I’m not sure.) “Nothing is impossible any more, you can turn your body into whatever you want it to be.”
Anna gets her bum inspected by Dr James Steele. “Buns of” he’s presumably called down the gym. He’s doing the inspection in the name of science, though Anna takes the opportunity to steal a compliment. “Are you saying you’re quite impressed with my derriere, James?” He is.
Anna’s co-presenter, Amar Latif, tries “the latest achingly cool fitness fad to ride the wave of popularity on social media with the celebrities”: stand-up paddle-boarding.
It’s good for an all-over workout, and it’s really enjoyabe. It also risks turning you into an uncool surfer uncle, patently ridiculous, wobbling on the water then falling in (Amar does, of course). There’s absolutely no way I am doing that.
What else you got Amar? A lot more hacking, mainly. He goes to Manchester to “hack the lunch break of a travel company”. God, it really is all about hacking. Then there is also the “top 10 foods for hacking your lunchbox”. Number one on that list: tomatoes, which offer a “double hack of weight-loss and exercise”.
I’m getting the message. The most important thing is to say “hack” an awful lot, the new way, so I’ll do that. And I’m going to spend loads of time on social media, to see what’s hashtagging and what the celebrities are doing. I’ll eat a few tomatoes, for the double hack. And that’s me sorted.
