Flexibility for men in their 30s. Or why it’s best not to drop your phone on the ground.

I am not hesitant to accept the realities of time and space. For instance, I accept that with the passage of time, I have started to occupy more and more space, which has had a decidedly detrimental effect on my flexibility.

For as long as I can remember, I have been growing older every year. The schoolboy complexion and smooth skin have survived thankfully, but the machinery has stiffened up quite a bit over the past decade, losing a lot of its erstwhile flexibility. In my twenties, the ability to bend down and touch my toes while keeping my knees locked was a point of pride with me. Since then, I’m afraid things have gone downhill. Just like Nicholas Cage’s career after Leaving Las Vegas.

But, like Nicholas Cage, I have not let the absence of proof convince me to the contrary that my skills have declined. I still go through life under the firm assumption that if I bend down suddenly under the table to grab an errant pen before it rolls away out of reach, I can get back up without the physical and spiritual parts of my body separating from each other. I’m not joking. I did something similar not too long ago, when the smartphone of a particularly attractive colleague slipped out of her grasp and fell under the table. Sensing an opportunity to impress, I dove in under the table and without a moment’s hesitation, twisted my upper torso and stretched my hand out as much as I could to grab the phone. And that’s the position they dragged me out from under the table about five minutes later. The physio managed to untangle me in another thirty minutes.

The colleague whose smartphone I tried to retrieve took pity on my hideous corpus and offered to introduce me to her pilates teacher. Apparently Pilates is the new yoga, just after yoga becomes obsolete by about 2021. So I called up the instructor one fine morning, described the situation in the most adult voice I could manage, and requested for immediate help with flexibility.

So began my tryst with Pilates.

In about two weeks’ time, through sheer willpower and grit, I had managed to train my body to the point where I could hold a plank for ten seconds without crying and peeing myself. The instructor too had managed to recover from the shock of having to clean up after a client’s pee. Minor urinary discomfort aside, it was nice not having to feel or look like a carelessly thrown sack of potatoes every time I sat down on a chair. My backbone started asserting itself in all sorts of ways. Although it stopped short of helping me negotiate a raise with my boss, it was well within its comfort zone when it came to asking for a second helping of free tiramisu at the local ice cream shop.

But that was the extent of it. Further immersion into the world of Pilates required copious amounts of money and willpower, both of which I was running short of by this time.

One key component of posture training in Pilates, I learnt, was how it lightened your wallet, thereby reducing the awkward and unbalanced pull on your posterior, thus allowing you to stand erect, cutting a fine though decidedly poorer frame.

Daily text messages from my bank reminded me that Pilates was continuing to make my frame finer and poorer by leaps and bounds. I was haunted by nightmares of being evicted from my apartment because I couldn’t pay the rent, thus becoming possibly the first homeless Marketing Director who could hold a plank for twenty seconds straight before collapsing from sheer hunger and shame.

In the end, I decided to cut bait and run. Flexibility is good and all, but as Jesus said, what good does it serve a man if he manages to achieve a plow pose only to lose his PS4 and TV in studio fee?

For the moment, I can bend down to grab errant smartphones, and on really good days when the weather is excellent and the old skeletal system is feeling particularly supple, I can even lift them off the ground. That will do.