The 20 Best Pop Culture Workouts, 1:

So over on Thinking The Lions, in between the usual pointless drivel about toast and grasshopper fables, I've been doing something I call "Project CXC," which is Project 190 for those of you who are Roman Numeral Impaired and therefore never know what Super Bowl we are on, and Project CXC is about how I'm trying to lose 63 pounds and get down to 190.

It's been going fitfully, at best.

But while I was swimming this morning, I got tired and needed to keep pushing myself and for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that I have twin almost-6-year-olds and so 99.7% of my life revolves around "Toys R Us" stores and Pixar movies, Dory from Finding Nemo popped into my head and I found myself thinking Just keep swimming just keep swimming over and over until I went insane.

That is, until I finished my swim.

Which, of course, got me thinking, as I swam, too, about other people (?) in pop culture and entertainment who might serve as suitable inspirations for those of us who find the "real" (?) world a bit uninspiring, what with all the sports heroes either pleading no contest to doping charges or being all smirky and unlikeable for other reasons, and so I decided to try another Minibest -- no, don't ask me to clearly delineate the categories on this blog, even I can't keep track of them anymore-- and this one will be a listing of Pop Culture Workouts -- those fictional exercises from movies, books, songs, whatever else pop culture is made up of (Youtube cat videos and Instagram photos of rich kids, I think) that could both keep me, and maybe you, working out and getting in shape -- or serve as a model for a brand new exercise workout and ohmygodthat'swhatIshould'vedone: I should've put this together as a book, THE POP CULTURE WORKOUT, and gotten rich.

Anyway, here's number one: they're not in any particular order, they're just in the order I thought of them and then listed them, so here's the first Best Pop Culture Workout, which you'd have to guess would come from Star Wars:

Yoda Jogging.

In the movies, Yoda rides on Luke's back as Luke swings and jogs through the swamps of Dagobah, exhorting Luke to jog while also telling him that a Jedi's strength "flows from The Force", which makes it seem kind of dumb to do push-ups and hand-stands if all you have to do is use The Force to shape your muscles. 

I'm sure it wouldn't hurt a Jedi to be in shape, and most of them seemed to be doing pretty well in that department, from what I remember of the movies, except that as Yoda points out, he's pretty small, and so it doesn't seem to especially help a Jedi to be in shape, or large, either. 

Maybe it's got something to do with training the mind? Physical fitness equals mental fitness?  In any event, Yoda's training methods are far superior to, say, Obi Wan's.  You never saw Ewan MacGregor climb onto Anakin's back, and that's probably why he became Darth Vader.