When weightlifting, try to keep hold of your patience and sense of humor

Nate Cosby
Staff columnist

I'm the kind of person that likes to work out. You can frequently find me strutting my rippling bone marrow across the floor of the Thomas Nordebaker Turner Gymnasium and Petting Zoo Center. I can bounce quarters off my chest all day (provided that I'm wearing my Abercrombie & Fitch rubber sweater that day).

I like to take my time while I'm working out too. Twelve hours is usually pretty sufficient for all my weightlifting needs. But as every avid lifter of weights knows, the most important thing you need before pushing that ship of physical motivation off the pier of chunkiness, is a weightlifting book, which will tell you exactly what you'll never be able to do correctly.

All of the books have amazingly arbitrary instructions. To properly execute the free weight biceps curl, stabilize each rep by smearing peanut butter on the desired muscle group (chunky peanut butter is recommended for maximum results). Remain straight throughout the exercise, at all times avoiding huffing, puffing or blowing houses down. After inhaling, exhale.

Then the next section will include an error/correction section, explaining what you can try to fix, but fail miserably, in your weight regimen. Error: Your elbows are slightly flexed in the preparatory position. Correction: Do not slightly flex your elbows in the preparatory position. Error: You use momentum to complete the rep. Correction: Have a large hairy man stand over you and have him threaten to tie your arms around your upper torso if you ever use momentum to complete the rep again.

These helpful books give you all sorts of different varieties of lifting methods, such as (and I'm not making these up): The Trunk Curl, the Twisted Trunk Curl and the Preacher Curl (which seems very religiously biased to me). Once you've gone through the entire book and studied and memorized every method, you forget every method' due to the fact that actually performing most of these methods would result in the dreaded Degenerative Pretzel-Imitating Body Syndrome (D.P.I.B.S.).

So, in closing, I'll leave you with this: The next time you want to pick up that fourteenth eclair, or the next time that you want to tie your shoes but you can't even see them, remember that there's always a place for you in the weight room- with friendly people there to help anyone lose weight (provided that you can produce your ID card, driver's license, library card, six proofs of purchase, your social security number and the knowledge of who invented the cotton gin.)

Nate Cosby is an undecided freshman from Columbus, Miss.