I’ve made the difficult decision to disinherit my older daughter this week. And really, it’s not fair, because she was only trying to help. But after three weeks of me with my new exercise trampoline, she sent me a link to an exercise program I can use for my trampoline. And I’m like, “There’s a routine to this? I thought I was just supposed to jump up and come back down!!!”
I really blame the internet more, though. I was looking for a good cardio activity for myself and after rejecting the selections of ballroom dancing and sumo wrestling, I found some wonderful material having to do with the cardio benefits of a trampoline. That sounded like fun…after all, how could you go wrong with a trampoline? Well, I’m glad you asked!
In the first place, the best cardio workout I’ve had so far was the day it arrived and I realized that “some assembly required” meant trying to string together about fifty bars, wires, legs, nuts, bolts and little plastic covers that weren’t quite big enough to stretch over the sharp edges. That little four-hour experience not only got my blood pumping and my fingers blistered, it also allowed my eyes to sting shut under a flood of pure body sweat and my profane vocabulary to reach a new level of perfection, honed by my utter frustration!
Eventually, I got the whole thing together in a reasonably upright position and then it was time to read the little booklet that came with it on the things you could do with it. I figured I just stand on it and bounce up and down, but the pictures on the front of the pamphlet told me I was in trouble. The main picture showed a woman in living color and tight red spandex jumping so high on the trampoline that she achieved a spectacular splits high above the bar that I used to keep me upright while I went up and down an inch or two!
For a couple of weeks I went down and climbed on the trampoline and bounced up and down a little, enjoying the way my washer and dryer and freezer seemed to float into mid-air with each jump. I was consoled by reminding myself that it takes time to get good on a trampoline and besides, my knee hurt sometimes so I couldn’t jump too hard, plus watching my appliances go up and down as I jumped made me a little nauseated.
Then my grandsons came for a visit. They were enchanted by the trampoline! Those energetic little beans could jump for hours and within an extremely short time, they were achieving jumps that I couldn’t even dream of. The final straw came when I went downstairs to observe my older grandson jumping on the trampoline, kicking up his heels between bounces, all the while unwrapping and eating an ice-pop he found in the freezer! So much for slow as she goes; the boy had beaten his old grandmother by a country mile..or rather, bounce.
I’m still trying with the trampoline, measuring my progress in ups and downs and all the little hazards in between. I’m not sure what it does for my cardio, but it’s a great little time-waster when I should be doing laundry or cooking a meal.
And that brings us back to my daughter. She thought it would be helpful if she sent me some suggestions for exercise routines on the trampoline. She didn’t realize that I wanted to live in my little up and down world, convincing myself that five minutes a day bouncing only high enough for my feet to lose contact minutely from the canvas was all I wanted. Nevertheless, she is disinherited. I don’t want you to worry about this, though. My fortune consists of a couple of twenty-dollar-bills stuffed in an old soup can and buried somewhere in the back yard, so she’s really not missing much. My fortunes tend to go up and down as well!
dropsinthewell 