Exercise and laziness -- now you can have both!

Although spring finally seems to be here*, the Hero and I have resolved to use the gym more, more being a relative term and in our case meaning "at all."

This was prompted by recent news items about exercise and health, which cited experts as saying that we do not necessarily have to be exercise fiends to benefit from working out. In fact, the recommended amount of exercise seems to be shrinking every time we read about the subject, perhaps because a significant number of Americans, such as ourselves, keep ignoring the advice every time they read it.

Recommendations used to be one hour of vigorous exercise a day, eight days a week, more if possible. When the average person responded by increasing their Couch Potato hours, experts said, well, half an hour three days a week was probably okay. And the 30 minutes didn't have to be continuous: you could do 15 minutes in the morning, 15 in the afternoon.

Now, experts say, 15 minutes just once a day, three days a week -- and really, you can break up even that amount: 1 minute going downstairs in the morning, 2 minutes going to get the paper, 3 minutes walking your kindergartner to the bus stop, 1 1/2 minutes running frantically back home to yank some cookies from the freezer she suddenly remembered she was supposed to bring to class, 1 1/2 min tearing back to the bus, etc.

Unless Americans reform their health ways soon, the recommendations are probably going to continue to trend downward. Pushing the garage door opener will be sufficient exercise, provided you do it twice a day. Opening the door to your car and getting in will count. Getting back out, too. "Please, Americans!" the experts will soon be pleading, "At least breathe deeply!"

And we will be pleasantly surprised to learn that simply walking into the gym, stashing our things in the storage lockers, looking around at the equipment, then retrieving our stuff and leaving --  such monumental effort will count for a full week's exercise.

We can't wait.

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*subject to change at any moment