It's Black History Month, and there's a solution for those of you who want to devote some time to celebrating black history without sacrificing your workout regimen. (This gets good.)
The Legacy Workout, posted to Tumbler by creators Andia Winslow and Monique Walton, allows you to do both at the same time. Set to African music, this five-minute video simulates movements associated with the endeavors of some of our most famous historical figures.
Need a tight core? Try Tuskeegees Fly Sit-Ups. Want to work on your speed? Do these Jackie Robinsons. And for more abdominal work, try the House Cleaners/Childrearers, in which, on your hands and knees, you simulate scrubbing the floor.
Here's what Winslow and Walton wrote about the fitness video:
The Legacy Workout is dedicated to the memory of bodies of work. Of bodies at work. And at play. Of minds committed to mining greatness, to combating injustice, to insuring a future for future bodies, and minds. The Legacy Workout is dedicated to legacy makers past, present and future. The black body. The celestial body. The empowered human body, in motion.
This is not trivial. This is tribute. Each movement reflects a person, a people, or a point in time—an era. Because they dreamed us, because they dreamed of a better place for us—and for themselves—we owe them. We owe it to ourselves to do/be better. To be caretakers of our bodies without which we cannot persist; we cease to exist. Infinity is our limit.
This isn't the first ode-to-black-history workout to make the Internet rounds. In 2012 a Harlem, N.Y-based CrossFit gym started Black History Month with a "slavery workout" that included a movement called "virtual shoveling," designed to simulate hard, manual labor. And last year, to commemorate the month, the gym featured a "Running From the Ku Klux Klan" workout.
This pretty much sums up how I feel about these very tenuous connections to burpees, sit-ups, slavery and black history:
P.S. Shout-out to Winslow, though, whose viral subway workout video is still dope.
Akoto Ofori-Atta is the editor of The Grapevine. Like her Facebook page and follow her on Twitter.
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If you want to see what's hot on black Twitter, check out The Chatterati.Akoto Ofori-Atta is the editor of The Grapevine. Like her Facebook page and follow her on Twitter.