Push Up And Beyond

My best friend and I had a particular loathing for high school gym class. Our teacher was one of those strict, no-nonsense types who was pretty much always yelling. The worst part was push-ups. Whenever we did them, everyone always laughed at me and said it looked like I was humping the ground, but the teacher never said what I was doing wrong, so I had to keep doing it that way, which didn’t help my already low self-esteem. Thankfully, I only needed to endure it for a year to get the mandatory credit.

Fast forward a few years, and I decide I want to get more into shape. I decide to try push-ups again. This time I get the idea to ask my father — a former gymnast — for advice. I demonstrate what I’ve been doing my whole life, and he tells me that since girls have a different center of gravity, because of the extra weight in the chest area, it’s better for girls to start by keeping their knees on the ground until they build up their strength. I had essentially been doing advanced-level push-ups my whole life, and nobody, not even the gym teacher — who should have known this –had bothered to correct me.

My friend, who also didn’t know about the knee thing, took the words right out of my mouth when I told her about this: “I’m gonna kill her.”