Excuse No. 3: I'm a couch potato

Cable-bodied

Stop the presses: Hugh Hefner’s celebrity girlfriends, made famous by their ridiculous reality show on E!, The Girls Next Door, have their own workout DVDs. Though they’re surprisingly effective, don’t risk the shame of someone seeing you buy the DVDs: If you subscribe to Comcast on Demand (programming that’s accessible whenever you want it), they’re available with just one press of your remote, along with many other workouts.

On a recent (freezing) Tuesday night, I use the weather as an excuse to skip my gym workout, and, instead, settle in at home with Bridget, one of Hef’s bootylicious ladies. I clear three feet of space between my bed and the TV and get ready. Her 15-minute workout consists of a whole lot of squats, lunges and crunches. So many, in fact, that I am sore the following day. Sore from Bridget: I never thought I’d utter that phrase.

The next night, I get busy with the Yoga for Abs workout, and tonight I’m going to do a striptease with Carmen Electra, all in the comfort of my bedroom. Comcast on Demand has dozens of choices, and you can even turn on a cardio video if you have enough room in your home to bounce around. The offerings change daily, and most of the videos are about 20 minutes long, so you can pick and choose a couple each night. It’s perfect during the long Chicago winters when all your motivation to leave the house is sapped. Price varies by location and package; comcast.com.

—Danielle Braff

Dance Dance revved up

Since I rarely feel motivated to sign up for a dance class but often crave a good dance workout, the video game Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2 for the PS2 sounds like my perfect match. As dance steps are displayed on the screen, players mimic the moves by stomping on a sensored pad that’s hooked up to the TV. No public humiliation necessary.

On a recent Sunday, in the comfort of my apartment and in the company of two friends, I test-drive the game’s workout mode, which offers fitness assessments (calories burned, miles traveled). But because it’s a weekend night, we substitute the usual exercise energy-boosters like Gatorade with cookies and cabernet. We start at the beginner level, two of us sitting on the couch while the third goes up to bat. We joke that my one friend interprets all the arrows backward because she’s dyslexic, but I’m even worse without any clinical diagnosis to blame. Our normally highly coordinated third friend flails her arms and stomps her feet as she nearly trips over herself trying to follow the arrows on the screen.

But aside from tiring of the outdated music selection—think Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle”—none of us are tiring physically, so we graduate to a more difficult level. After a few rounds, none of us have even come close to catching on. Impatiently, I start jumping all over the dance mat.

Two hours later, according to the game, we’ve traveled 3.1 miles and burned 180 calories between the three of us, but after sharing a bottle of wine and a dozen cookies, we’ve surely done more harm than good. $39.99 for game, $54.99 for pad at ddrgame.com.

— Jessica Herman

Home sweat home

All of my reasons to remain a couch potato are quashed when Holmes Place Health Club director of training Nick Giordano shows me that if you can’t bring yourself to the gym, you can easily bring the gym to your home. In a matter of minutes, he transforms my tiny kitchen into an impromptu fitness center using only a mat ($19.99, Sports Authority, locations throughout the city), an exercise ball ($29.99, Sports Authority) and a set of kitchen chairs that will function as a bench press. A set of hand weights is also recommended, but in the spirit of DIY, Giordano fashions a set of eight-pound free weights out of two-gallon jugs of water I have stored in the pantry.

After taking me through some general stretching, he lines up the chairs in a row and demonstrates bench exercises, including leg curls, which involve lying facedown across the row of seats; quad stretches, in which you face away from the chair with the back of one foot resting on the seat as you squat down; and step-ups, where a foot placed on the front of the chair helps you step up onto the seat. Then, the exercise ball comes into play: My pectoral muscles are put to work as he shows me how to rest my back on it while I lift the water jugs above me. Those chest muscles can’t seem to catch a break as I’m then shown how to face an open doorway, rest a raised forearm on each side of the door jamb as if surrendering to the home-fitness gods, and lean forward through the open space.

Giordano has plenty of other tricks up his Adidas-striped sleeve: He finishes by demonstrating how to use a sturdy leather belt as a resistance band by holding the ends in my hands, stepping on the middle with one foot and pulling up with my arms. For our final activity, he shows me how to time my regimen by putting together an iPod playlist in which each song or two cues a new exercise. Had I known fitness came this thrifty and convenient, I would’ve pried myself from my couch-cushion groove a long time ago.

—Martina Sheehan