Fitness

I’m standing on stage in front of a few hundred people wearing a tiny Swarovski crystal-covered bikini and six-inch Perspex platform stripper heels. That’s just the start. If you are a female figure bodybuilder, as I am, you get to wear nail art, big hair and lots of bling-bling jewellery. I even have crystals embedded in my false eyelashes.

My deep dark tan is painted on and then there’s another layer of shimmer gel so I look like a bronzed-up Barbie doll with muscles.

I turned 50 this year and decided to enter a bodybuilding competition - a memorable way to mark what might otherwise be a year of regret.

Continue reading "The 50-year-old bodybuilder" »

While the media last week fixated on the political “divide” in Australia, with vastly divergent views expressed on the carbon tax at the forums and some confrontations between people with passionate viewpoints, it’s worth remembering that every day of every week, Aussies are getting on with their lives and doing remarkable things.

It’s worth remembering that there is so much more that unites us as a nation than that which currently divides us.

All that is great about Australia was on display in a rain-soaked corner of Queensland last weekend.

Continue reading "Here’s to mateship, courage, endurance and sacrifice" »

Being a proper Renaissance man, I recently swore off exercise. Every year, my brain - being the smug bastard that it is - tells my body to get healthy, which usually complies. This year’s embarrassingly brief dalliance with fitness, however, saw my body rebel, invoking Charles Darwin himself. 

It all began with a recent viewing of The Fugitive. Harrison Ford just keeps running and running and running in that movie. What if, I thought, a one-armed man killed my wife and I couldn’t prove it and was sent to jail, only to escape thanks to a CGI train crash? Tommy Lee Jones would need only follow the trail of vomit and tears for five minutes before he found me wheezing in the foetal position, begging for leniency.

And so, I’ve spent the past month running and tearing various muscles in an effort to become healthier. It occurred to me last week, however, that it’s all a bunch of nonsense. As I spluttered my way up one of Taringa’s many tortuous hills, I realised exercise and healthy living was the height of human stupidity.

Continue reading "Laziness is a right our ancestors fought for" »

Think you’re a normal weight? So did I, until I got stuck in lift at 2am.

A big group of us piled in and it promptly broke.

After the shock of screaming to a halt between floors, we were indignant. The lift said it could hold 12 people. There were only 11 of us.

Continue reading "Fat tax useless if overweight is the new average" »

If you have an aversion to thousands of riders in brightly coloured lycra, it’s not for you. If, however, you are a keen recreational cyclist who delights in an outdoor adventure, the Great Victorian Bike Ride is one of the ‘must do’ events in life.

First conducted in 1984, when 2,100 people cycled from Wodonga to Melbourne, it has grown into one of the great cycle touring events in the world. Last week, 5,000 people rode from Portland in the west of the State, via Cape Bridgewater, along the iconic Great Ocean Road to Geelong.

Averaging 70 kilometres a day, the huge peleton spread for kilometres along the coastal road. There was every shape and size of human imaginable, battling headwinds from Port Fairy to Port Campbell one day, and then the long climbs to Laver’s Hill and over the Otways the next.

Continue reading "The cycle of your life" »

How times change. When I started working in an office a little over 20 years ago, you could still smoke at your desk. In fact, when you were shown the stationary cabinet on your first day in a new job you could kit yourself out with a stapler and sticky-tape dispenser as well as an ashtray.

In those days, ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ was an everyday question when checking in for an airline flight’, you watched the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup over summer and the Winfield Cup over winter and the back cover of almost every women’s magazine carried an ad featuring an attractive blonde, a beach, acres of cheesecloth and a packet Alpine.

At about the same time blokes would go to the beach in the middle of the day, shirtless and hatless, while women would lay for hours baking themselves to a golden brown while occasionally basting themselves with coconut oil. Sun protection was not standard work issue for workers out of doors and sunshirts and sensible hats had the same sartorial appeal as sandals with long socks.

Continue reading "Sip, slop, slap: let’s stop drinking like it’s 1969" »

I have battled with my weight for the past 12 years. I’m now 40.

I thought having kids would be a turning point. I thought having a suspected heart attack in the West Indies while filming my show An Aussie Goes Calypso would be a turning point. I thought turning 40 would be a turning point.

But nothing seems to stick and I continue to jump on and off a number of diets and fitness regimes.

Continue reading "The plan to win my 12-year battle with the bulge at last" »

If you’re like me - and hopefully you’re not, since that would make you a lazy couch potato with a strong dislike for exercise - then you’ll no doubt be heartily cheered by the efforts of a bunch of amphibious rats somewhere in Japan.

Apparently two groups of these rats were set different tasks. The unlucky ones got to paddle in a pool for six hours, with a brief break halfway through. The ‘lucky’ ones got to carry a load of weight and struggle hard for twenty seconds before being lifted from the water for ten seconds, and then thrown back in.

Clearly, some people have a strange idea of fun. But for the rats, there were some interesting changes. The ones that exercised for six hours got fitter.

But, and this is the good news bit, so did the rats which did twenty seconds hard work, followed by ten seconds break – repeated over just four and a half minutes of swimming.

Continue reading "Forget eight-minute abs, six minutes is enough exercise" »