Workout at Home - a short essay.

You sweat. You groan. You grimace. All in a day’s work, perhaps, but it still hurts. You look the part at least: yoga pants and flowy athletic top, sitting on the yoga mat you rarely use.

What’s silly is doing this in your own living room, barely spacious enough for the mat between the couch and the TV. Who needs to look cute, alone at home? But yoga pants are stretchy for a reason – it’s useful. That burpee, that attempted split: that won’t happen in jeans. The instructor on the screen talks to you as if she were live, but she’s not. She tells you to push through to the end, to feel the burn, as if she can hear you complaining now. Then again, you are complaining now, out loud, with no one to hear you. So that makes it a two-way street, with roadblocks on both ends.

Finally, you sigh and relax the aching tension in your abs, and fall back on the mat, sweaty and tired. You did it at least. You did what you told yourself to do.

It’s so lame, though: the chipper instructor giving you a thumbs-up through the screen. But as the life crawls back into your muscles, you breathe deeply and think—What the heck?—and flash her a thumbs-up back.