100-ish Days of Jane Fonda’s Original Workout (1982)

If you know me at all you know that I really hate working out. I don’t hate physical activity, like dancing or hiking, but the idea of just hanging out at a gym for an hour while doing repetitive motions and being able to be perceived by other people while I am at my lowest just makes me want to die, frankly. Sure, I tried the workout group with my coworkers but our leader was once training for the Marines so her workouts were so intense that it made my muscles ache for days while I never seemed to improve. When our building’s gym inevitably closed due to a virus going around (have you heard of it?), I finally felt free.

As months went by, I kept seeing people on Instagram and TikTok and the like doing workout challenges. When I could kind of have a social life by doing outdoor things in the summer, I wasn’t really interested in devoting my time to fitness but once it got really cold out and any kind of social interaction was off the table, using my yoga mat seemed more interesting.

Most of the YouTube exercise videos were simply too intense for my tastes. I wanted to do exercise, sure, but I didn’t want to be a sweaty gross mess afterwards. And that’s when it hit me — the Jane Fonda workout. I had seen some people doing this classic workout tape on an almost daily basis and it seemed like a good choice. It was the workout tape…