The global passion for calisthenics is on the rise. It’s the way 40-somethings seek early retirement via the high-speed route to a heart attack. You can do it anywhere, at any time, and you don’t need any equipment other than your own arms and legs. It involves push-ups, pull-ups, squats, planks, and crunches, repeating the routine until death comes knocking. After a half-hour session at dawn, you’ll feel much better, unless you survive.
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Kicking, jumping, or running multiculturally as if you’d just stolen a handbag: all these exercises can be done at home or out on the street. They are everyday activities our ancestors performed. After all, thawing a frozen boiler pipe, fixing the roof antenna, or chopping firewood are all forms of calisthenics. Nowadays, we avoid those chores by paying someone else to do them, which is also a form of calisthenics, since seeing the bill from the plumber, electrician, or woodcutter often causes your sphincter to contract repeatedly. That’s a sign it’s getting into shape, and soon you’ll have an ass like Pamela Anderson’s in 1992.
Instagram is teeming with AI-generated clips of 50-year-old men sporting arm muscles the size of Kim Jong-un’s neck. “I used to be a pathetic guy, a piece of shit just like you, with a gut as disgusting as yours, muscles as flabby as that jelly hanging off your arms, and more aching bones than my grandmother,” they say. “I was so fat and gross that girls would spit on me as I walked by, or try to shove an apple in my mouth and pop me in the oven. I mean, I was just like you: an aging hippo with more grease on me than a Burger King deep fryer. But now I look like Popeye. I take the stairs three at a time without wheezing like a Harley-Davidson, and girls kiss me four at a time on the street. Want to know how I did it? Buy a $70,000,000 individual calisthenics training membership and become who I am. Stop being that useless, worthless, fat pig right now. You’re human scum, the greatest disgrace to manhood in history.”
Thanks to the “happy” philosophy, empathy, and pleasant rhetoric of these AI-generated trainers, thousands of people of “limited thinness” (as a woke type might put it) end up shelling out $70,000,000 just to receive a daily email containing torture instructions, things like: “Today you have to do 600 squats on your office desk”; “Imagine a guy with a knife running at you screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ and try to defend yourself with flying kicks”; or “Try touching your groin with the tip of your thumb after passing your arm under your armpit and wrapping it around your neck three times.” In other words, calisthenics ultimately involves no movements that your grandmother didn’t perform several times a day while going about her housework in the countryside.
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It never ceases to amaze me that the most sedentary generation in history, with the possible exception of the one that discovered Tetris on the 1980s Game Boy, is now getting so passionate about intense calisthenics workouts. Perhaps we should rename today’s youth the “Contradictory Generation.” In any case, those of us who champion the foundations of Western civilization ought to celebrate this calisthenics craze. It is the only remaining link young people have to classical civilization, given that the term derives from the Greek words “kállos” (beauty) and “sthénos” (strength). Alexander the Great would be proud of today’s youth. (RELATED: Socializing and Longevity: Does Online Count?)
Personally, and following the advice of my personal trainer, who is fatter than I am, I plan to sign up tonight for a calisthenics exercise that consists of lifting a glass, specifically the “bar-counter” discipline. The best thing about calisthenics, after all, is that, as the muscular old guy in the Instagram ad says, it can be done anywhere, using any activity as a foundation. I just hope I don’t wake up tomorrow with sore liver muscles. (RELATED: In Vino Veritas — and Civilization)
I should be doing a lot of this calisthenics, because lately I’ve had less resistance to rum. I’ve lost 35 pounds since January, which means I look as hot as Leonardo DiCaprio did before an Argentine model convinced him he’d still be sexy even if he turned into a whale. Everyone asks me how I did it. I usually make up stories about gruelling calisthenics sessions and diets based on celery and orange peel, but the truth is that all I’ve done to lose weight is deal with domestic problems, rack up debt, put up with Pedro Sánchez’s government, and try to win arguments with women.
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