People everywhere who have been able to shelter-in-place have been amazed to discover that there is still not enough time in the day for a full one-minute plank.
“As a restaurant server who was laid off a couple weeks ago, this is an incredibly stressful time, but it’s also a time where I have 16 hours a day to fill,” says Rebecca Clarke. “I told myself I was going to exercise every day, but remarkably there just still isn’t time for any of it – especially a one-minute plank.”
“I wake up in the morning, I make myself breakfast, and then somehow it’s 6pm,” adds Rebecca. ‘I really don’t understand the math behind it but it’s definitely happening.”
And indeed math seems to be the problem for many as they attempt to solve the impossible equation of fitting a one-minute plank into a 1,440-minute period.
“It’s all about finding the elusive sweet spot,” says work-from-home social media coordinator, Jana Moon. “If you’re too full, you can’t do a plank, but if you’re too hungry, then you definitely can’t do a plank. If you’re thinking of mopping the floor, then that takes precedent, and if you need to send an email at some point in the day, then you shouldn’t be lying around planking.”
For many, it seems that the necessary planning of the period both before and after a plank turns the one-minute exercise into a multi-hour affair, but others are even more lost at sea in attempting the effort.
“The more time I have, the more impossible it is to fit a plank into that time,” says full time student Ronni Thompson. “The vastness of the open day in overwhelming. In the morning I can do it in the afternoon, in the afternoon I can do it at night, and at night I begin to wonder: What is a tomorrow? Who is day? Perhaps I am planking in a parallel timeline right now.”
Emergency and other essential workers could not be reached for comment on the phenomenon.
