How to score: Give yourself a 5 if your heart continues to beat unassisted. If you score any lower than that, you probably shouldn’t do this particular test.

3. AEROBICS TEST

You’ll need:

A stopwatch

Gerald Ford

Directions: The word “aerobics” comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning “ability to,” and bics, meaning “withstand tremendous boredom.” This is the difference between a world-class marathon runner and a normal person: a world-class marathon runner has undergone sufficient aerobic conditioning that he can run for nearly three hours without falling asleep, whereas a normal person will quit after a few minutes and look for something interesting to do.

What you want to do in this test is start your stopwatch, then see how long you can listen to Gerald Ford discuss the federal deficit before you doze off. If Gerald Ford is unavailable, you can use televised golf.

How to score: 15 seconds is excellent. More than 30 seconds indicates some kind of brain damage.

Divide your age by the number of blocks it took to hold you on the bottom of the pool, then add the number of seconds it took for Gerald Ford to sedate you multiplied by your scorpion score, unless you are claiming two or more exemptions. This will give you your “fitness quotient”; store it wherever you keep the instructions for operating your various digital watches.

Before you begin any fitness program, you should, of course, have your doctor give you a thorough physical examination in which he shoves cold steel implements into your various bodily orifices and sticks needles directly into your skin and makes you put on a flimsy garment apparently made from a cocktail napkin and parade through the waiting room carrying a transparent container filled with your own urine past several people you hope to someday ask for jobs. Or, if you’d prefer not to undergo this procedure, you may simply send your doctor some money.

Your body is like a superbly engineered luxury automobile: if you use it wisely an maintain it properly, it will eventually break down, most likely in a bad neighborhood. To understand why this is, let’s take a look inside this fascinating “machine” we call the human body.

Your body is actually made up of billions and billions of tiny cells, called “cells,” which are so small that you cannot see them. Neither can I. The only people who can see them are white-coated geeks called “biologists.” These are the people who wrote your high-school biology textbooks, in which they claimed to have found all these organs inside the Frog, the Worm, and the Perch. Remember? And remember how, in Biology Lab, you were supposed to take an actual dead frog apart and locate the heart, the liver, etc., as depicted in the elaborate color diagrams in the textbook?

Of course, when you cut it open, all you ever found was frog glop, because that is what frogs contain, as has been proven in countless experiments performed by small boys with sticks. So you did what biology students have always done: you pretended you were finding all these organs in there, and you copied the diagram out of the book, knowing full well that in real life a frog would have no use whatsoever for a liver.

Anyway, biologists tell us that the human body consists of billions of these tiny cells, which combine to form organs such as the heart, the kidney, the eyeball, the funny bone, the clavichord, the pustule, and the hernia, which in turn combine to form the body, which in turn combines with other bodies to form the squadron. Now let’s take a closer look at the various fitness-related organs and see if we can’t think of things to say about them.

Your skin performs several vital functions. For example, it keeps people from seeing the inside of your body, which is repulsive, and it prevents your organs from falling out onto the ground; where careless pedestrians might step on them. Also, without skin, your body would have no place to form large facial zits on the morning before your wedding.

But for fitness-oriented persons like yourself, the important thing about skin is that it acts as your Body’s Cooling System. Whenever you exercise or get on an elevator, sweat oozes out of millions of tiny skin holes so it can evaporate and cool the area. Unfortunately, virtually all of these holes are located in your armpits, which is stupid. I mean, you hardly ever hear people complaining about having hot armpits. So what we seem to have here is one of those cases where Mother Nature really screwed up, like when she developed the concept of nasal hair.

Your muscles are what enable you to perform all of your basic movements, such as bowling, sniping, pandering, carping, and contacting your attorney. Basically, there are two kinds of muscle tissue: the kind that people in advertisements for fitness centers have, which forms units that look like sleek and powerful pythons writhing just beneath the surface of the skin, and the kind you have, which looks more like deceased baby rabbits.

The beauty of muscle tissue, however, is that it responds to exercise. In a later chapter, we’ll talk about how, using modern exercise equipment, such as the Nautilus machine, in a scientific workout program, you can stretch those pudgy little muscle tissues of yours to the point where you won’t even be able to scream for help without the aid of powerful painkilling drugs.

How many bones do you think your skeletal system has? Would you say 50? 150? 250? 300? More than 300?

If you guessed 50, you’re a real jerk. I would say it’s around 250, but I don’t really see why it’s all that important. The only important part of your skeleton, for fitness purposes, is your knees.

Knees are God’s way of telling mankind that He doesn’t want us to do anything really strenuous. When we do, our knees punish us by becoming injured, as you know if you’ve ever watched professional football on television:

ANNOUNCER: The handoff goes to Burger; he’s tackled at the six. ... Uh oh! He’s hurt!

COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like a knee injury, Bob, from the way that bone there is sticking out of his knee.

ANNOUNCER: Burger’s teammates are bending over him. ... Uh oh! Now they’re down on the field!

COLOR COMMENTATOR: Looks like they’ve all injured their knees, too, Bob.

ANNOUNCER: Here comes the team physician, who is. ... Uh oh! Now he’s down on the ...

So one of the things we’re going to stress in our fitness program is knee safety. We’re going to get you so aware of this important topic that you won’t even discuss racquetball over the telephone without first putting on knee braces the size of industrial turbines.