How a Retired Teacher Moved More With a Cubii

Two winters ago I went down on my own driveway. Black ice, a bag of groceries in each hand, and legs that did not react fast enough to save me. Nothing broke. My confidence did. For the next six weeks I moved about as little as a person can move and still call herself active, and I told myself I was being careful.

My doctor was patient with me and then she was direct. She said the answer to a bad fall is not less movement, it is more of it, as long as I build up the muscles that hold me steady. Then she asked whether I had considered a seated exerciser, the sort of thing she called a Cubii. She did not write me a prescription. She wrote four words on a slip of paper. Keep moving, gently. I copied them onto an index card for the refrigerator and then ignored them for another month, because that is what I do.

Here is what I tried first, because I think the false starts matter more than the ending. I walked to the end of the driveway with Gene holding my elbow, which was exercise for Gene and not for me. I did a chair exercise printout from the senior center exactly twice. I drove twenty-five minutes to a pool class twice a week for a month and quit, because the drive, the parking lot, and the cold on my wet hair added up to more effort than the class itself. None of it stuck.

What stuck was small, boring, and sits on my living room floor. My daughter had one under her desk at work and brought it over for a weekend to see whether I could get along with it. I sat in my own chair with my feet on the pedals and pedaled for ten minutes during the morning news. That was all. Ten minutes.

Ten minutes is not a workout and I am not going to pretend it is. But it was ten minutes I would otherwise have spent sitting perfectly still, and my right knee, the one with the arthritis in it, did not complain once.

Ten minutes on the Cubii during the morning news is ten minutes I would have spent sitting still. That is the whole trick, and it took me until sixty-eight to learn it.

The Cubii JR1 is a compact elliptical you use from a chair. You do not stand on it and you do not hold on to anything, which suits my living room because there is nothing to hold on to there except the dog we do not have. It stands about ten inches tall and weighs a little over twenty-five pounds, so it stays where you put it. Mine lives on the carpet in the spare bedroom from April to October and moves in front of the television once the Michigan winter settles in.

The resistance is manual with eight levels, and I started at the easiest one and stayed there for two solid weeks before I moved up. There is a display that tracks time, calories, and distance, and it runs on batteries, so I do not have a cord running across the floor for Gene to trip over. If you are the kind of person who likes a written record, there is a Cubii app where you type the numbers in from the display yourself, by hand. It does not do it for you. I read a review complaining about exactly that, and the reviewer was right.

The first month I did ten minutes most mornings. The second month, fifteen. By March I was doing twenty-five minutes on the mornings the news was interesting and fifteen on the mornings it was not. I have never once gotten out of breath. I have never once had to put on special shoes. Those two facts are the entire reason I am still at it in my second year, when I have quit nearly everything else I have ever started.

What it did not do is worth saying plainly. It did not fix my knee. It did not make me steady on ice, and I still take the long way around the driveway in January. The listing gives a maximum weight recommendation of 150 pounds, which is worth checking against your own situation before you order. Gene tried it once, said the motion felt strange to his hips, and went back to his chair, and that is fine too.

What it did do is shorten the stiff hour after I get up. It gets my legs moving on the days when the sidewalk is a sheet of ice and the alternative is nothing at all. And it handed me the thing my doctor has been asking me for since the fall, which is a way to keep moving that does not depend on the weather, the roads, or my own courage.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to call your doctor first, especially if you have a knee or a hip that has opinions, or a heart condition, or a balance problem you have not mentioned to anybody. I am a retired third-grade teacher, not a physician. This is a machine, not a cure, and it will not stop you from falling in a parking lot.

I would tell you to start at the easiest resistance and stay there longer than feels necessary, because the point of the first month is not fitness, it is the habit. I would tell you that no machine can get you out of the chair. It only helps once you have decided to sit down and put your feet on it, and that decision is yours, and nobody sells it. And I would tell you that twenty quiet minutes while the snow does whatever it likes outside has been worth more to me than the gym membership I kept paying for and never used.