On exercise. And on exercising our rights

Sarah Boseley, a fine Guardian journalist, recently shared an invaluable insight on the subject of the best way to protect health through exercise:

Incorporating physical activity into our everyday lives, from taking the stairs to holding “walkaround” meetings in the office, is more likely to protect us from heart disease and an early death than buying a gym membership, according to the author of a major new global study.

A sentiment that needed voicing.

I’ve often been struck by the number of people who apparently feel that buying a gym membership was sufficient to guarantee them good health. Actually using the membership? Three or four times in the first month, maybe. A couple in the next. But in the long term? Life’s too short, even when prolonged by exercise. It’s like War and Peace, isn’t it? How many people have bought the book and how many fewer have read it? How many holders of gym memberships go so far as to use them?

A long Russian novel and a passport to strenuous exercise
More honoured in the purchase than the use?

Still, it was good to read that walking around and using stairs is helpful. It was a relief, to tell the truth. Following my purchase of a fitbit last month, I’m still living under its tyranny. When it tells me to get up and walk a bit, or to do a few more steps to reach my daily goal, I find it hard to tell it to get lost and remember it’s only a bracelet and not my master. Of course, it would only provoke a wry smile, in me and perhaps in it too, if I did say anything like that – somewhere deep in whatever passes for a soul in a purely electronic device, it knows it’s my master.

So it’s a comfort to have it confirmed that what it’s making me do might help improve my health.

On the other hand, it’s always intriguing to see the message it sends me, from time to time, announcing that it has decided to “sync” with my phone. That gives me something of a syncing feeling, but not for what it's doing to my phone so much as for what it's doing to my language. 

That’s a fine verb, sync. An alternative, I assume, to swym, which wouldn't be appropriate for so notoriously a non-waterproof device as a fitbit. But what, I wonder, does the verb use as a past form? I feel it ought to be “sunc”. But that might lead to confusion: “I’ve sunc my fitbit” sounds like a cruel way to treat a device that dislikes water. Then again, maybe that’s exactly what I should do. Sinking the odious thing might be a blow for freedom, an insurgent act against unbearable tyranny. Perhaps under the slogan “Couch potatoes of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your fitbits". 

Chuck it in a swimming pool and escape its thrall? It might not be a bad move.

I could always buy a gym membership instead.