Random Thoughts

[Angrboda]

Behold the Monty Python workout. It’s silly! It’s walky! It works, according to an important — or, at least, actual — study published today in the annual holiday edition of the BMJ, a British medical journal.

Employing high-tech science and a tittering adolescent’s sensibility, the study’s researchers filmed volunteers perambulating like the ungainly bureaucrats in the Monty Python comedy troupe’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, while wearing metabolic monitors.

Their aim was to determine the physiological effects of ambling around a track in the manner of the actor John Cleese, playing the apparently boneless Mr. Teabag, the head of the Ministry of Silly Walks, or Michael Palin’s Mr. Putey, a wannabe silly walker whose screwball stroll needs work.

The scientists soberly wondered whether silly-fying people’s walking form would up the intensity and caloric expenditure of their exercise and make an otherwise simple stroll into a serious workout. The study is part of the BMJ’s annual holiday lineup of legitimate but offbeat research.

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In practical terms, these findings suggest super-silly walking can be strenuous enough to qualify as “vigorous exercise,” Gaesser said. If someone adopts a silly walk for at least 11 minutes a day, he continued, they will meet the standard recommendation of at least 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week, which should meaningfully improve health and aerobic fitness.

(Washington Post)