What you want, men, is a fashion look that gives you freedom of movement but at the same time displays, in large letters, the names of at least three major manufacturers of sporting equipment. Also you want to wear a headband and wristbands to absorb the tremendous outpouring of sweat that we males emit when we are engaged in strenuous masculine physical activity. (If you are one of those unfortunate males who does not emit tremendous outpourings of sweat, you should purchase, from the Nike Corporation, a container of “Pro-spiration” spray-on sweat droplets, which you apply discreetly in the locker room before you begin your workout.)

Ideally, of course, you will also sport some evidence of a semicrippling football injury. The best kind is a medical knee contraption of such enormous size and complexity that your racquetball opponent will feel like absolute pond scum if he hits the ball anywhere other than directly to you. Or you might want to look into a new product from the Adidas Corporation called “The All-Scars,” which are large, realistic, and extremely repulsive synthetic removable knee scars patterned after those belonging to famous battered sports legends such as Joe Namath.

Can you use a personal home computer in your fitness program? You bet! Computers are incredibly versatile machines that can do everything from screw up your airplane reservation to cause an income tax blunder that gets you sentenced to a life term in a slimy walled federal prison so utterly desolate that the inmates pay rodents for sex! So they’re a “natural” for the fitness movement!

One obvious way to use a computer, of course, is to record your daily fitness statistics such as weight, height, age, etc., on it, using a felt-tipped marker. But the best way to really unleash the power of a computer is to lift it up and set it down repeatedly, thus building muscle mass and definition. As you become stronger, you can gradually add weight, in the form of “disk drives,” until eventually you move up to a heavier computer—and perhaps someday even reach the point where you can hoist what computer bodybuilding enthusiasts call a “mainframe” computer!

For the average person who does not have a background in data processing, I generally recommend starting out with a 35-pound computer. Unfortunately, computer weights are measured not in pounds, but in “K’s” (as in 512K), which stands for “kilograms.” There is a way to convert kilograms to pounds, but it is almost always fatal, so I recommend, as a wise consumer tip, that you go through your entire planned computer-lifting routine right at the store with several reputable computers, checking each for heft, balance, and tendency to break into 600,000 tiny pieces when you lift it over your head and drop it, before you actually purchase anything.

Of course, some of you, and here I am talking about the technically oriented ones, the ones with a thin layer of mechanical pencil dust on your clothing—in a word, the geeks—may even want to plug your computer directly into the wall, thus allowing electricity to flow through it. In this case, you’ll also need to purchase a “program,” or “software,” which comes on a “floppy disk,” an object the size of a 45 RPM record such as “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” which we used to dance to at “record hops” back when Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was president.

Fortunately for you and the entire fitness movement in general, I have developed a special piece of fitness-oriented software called the “Dave Barry Total Diskette Workout Program.” The way it works is, you put it in the computer, which asks you to type in your name. Then you type in your name, and the computer forgets it immediately because the truth is that the computer really doesn’t give a damn what your name is. It was just trying to be polite.

Next, the computer holds an Interactive Fitness Dialogue with you, wherein it elicits certain facts from you regarding your specific fitness situation, then it evaluates the facts and reports its findings, as follows:

COMPUTER: ENTER THE LAST TIME YOU ENGAGED IN A WORKOUT.

YOU: (Enter the last time you engaged in a workout, such as “just before Thanksgiving” or “World War II.”)

COMPUTER (thinks for a minute, and proceeds): SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU’VE DONE ALL THE WORKING OUT YOU NEED TO DO FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE. ALL WORKING OUT MAKES JACK A DULL BOY! HA HA! PLEASE ENTER A LIST OF THE FOODS YOU WOULD LIKE TO EAT TODAY.

YOU: (Enter a list consisting of no more than 100 foods which you would like to eat on that particular day.)

COMPUTER: I DON’T SEE ANY PROBLEM WITH THE FOODS YOU HAVE LISTED. HAVE A NICE DAY.

That’s all there is to it! In less than five minutes, you have accomplished, using a computer, a data-processing feat that would take 60,000 trained mathematicians 1.3 billion years to accomplish, and even longer if you let them go to the bathroom! And you will be pleased to learn that this program will also do your income taxes (“YES! YOU CAN DEDUCT THAT! I’M SURE OF IT!”).

Basically you have two options: your living room, or a fitness club. The advantage of getting fit in your living room is that it’s free and you can scratch yourself openly. The disadvantage is that your living room is where you keep your little dish of M&Ms for guests, which means you’ll actually gain roughly a pound of ugly fat for each week of your home fitness program.

So you should probably join a fitness club such as you see advertised in the newspapers by photographs of attractive models wearing leotards fashioned from a maximum of eight leotard molecules. Before you join such a club, you should take a tour conducted by one of the fit and muscular staff persons. This person will show you the various rooms and pieces of equipment, then hold your head under the whirlpool until you agree to buy a membership.

Here’s a useful checklist of the features a good fitness club should have:

A powerful odor of disinfectant Various species of hairs in the sinks Signs all over the place reminding you that the management is not responsible A loudspeaker system playing soothing musical numbers as performed by the Dentist’s Office Singers A door that says “WEIGHT ROOM” that you never venture through because large sweating men go in there and emit noises like oxen with severe intestinal disorders Two women in the sauna who are always there, no matter what hour of the day or night, talking loudly about growths in their pelvic regions

The word “sauna” is Finnish for “very hot little room with strangers in it breathing funny,” and people who’ve tried it agree that it’s a very invigorating experience, provided you get out in time. If the door sticks or anything, you have about as much chance of survival as the unfortunate corals who happened to be residing on that reef where we detonated the original hydrogen bomb, because the usual temperature inside a sauna is 180 degrees, which you may recognize as the recommended final temperature for cooked turkeys, very few of which live to tell about it.

This high temperature is, of course, very good for you because your body contains traces of toxic minerals such as lead, which get in there when you get drunk and eat paint, and the heat helps you sweat them out. Really, I’m not making this up. Here’s a direct quote from Shape magazine, an authoritative journal:

“Sweating is now a significant route for eliminating trace elements from the body.”

So that’s the good news. The bad news, of course, is that these trace elements have to go somewhere, presumably onto the sauna seat, which means if you use a spa sauna, you’re lounging around on a lot of other people’s trace elements.