I did not watch the State of the Union address. I don't think I missed much. Instead, we watched Star Trek. It was important.

Teh Wife is thinking of taking some yoga classes or something at this place down the street. It's one train stop away, but awkward to walk to because of the river. Should be cool, though I do tend to look down on yoga as a complete fitness solution. Here's why: there are a number of components of fitness, and while flexibility and the components improved while you move around a little bit are important, that's hardly everything, and yoga classes are fairly expensive for the benefits you receive. Most notably absent in yoga is a significant strength component. Strength is the most important component of physical fitness for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that improvements in strength will drive improvements in most of the other components of fitness (to a point, but especially with people who have low levels of fitness). I know some of you will say, "But... yoga makes me stronger!" Well, yes. When you're very weak, even going for a walk might make you stronger. If you can only do 5 pushups, doing pushups will make you stronger. When you can do several sets of 20 pushups, pushups are not making you stronger. The exercises you will typically do in yoga classes are incapable of making you strong because there is no progressive overload. Most people, especially women, desperately need to get stronger more than they need almost any other adaptation. Accordingly, yoga is less than ideal if it is all you are doing.

Anyway. I think it's a good idea, though, because moving around is better than not moving around, there are some specific benefits to yoga, and it's likely to be something she will actually do. The hardest part of any program is conformance, so the last one is especially important. It's much better than "jogging" because jogging makes you weak, inflexible, and injured, besides the fact that even athletes in running sports don't train the way stereotypical "joggers" do. Further, though I'm not exactly spending a lot on my strength training (my gym membership is $210 for the entire year, though that's not all that I'm spending), I should be willing to plunk down some money for Teh Wife's training even if I don't believe it's the most effective way to achieve general fitness. At least it's not Crossfit. That makes you weak, injured, and broke. I think I would prefer jogging. Anyway.

Today: first day of class. Mildly excited. I hope my lack of prerequisites isn't going to be a problem. I've done non-formal statistics and regression stuff in an academic and a business setting and looked at statistics formally on my own, so that should be enough to fake the pre-reqs, in my opinion, despite the skepticism of the professor, so, well, anyway. The worst that can happen is that I have to treat this as two courses. Woo graduate class in statistics...