Brain muscle

The app includes about 100 kinds of training, and choosing the right ones plays a key role in getting ahead, because ranking is determined by how much time you train rather than on the difficulty of the exercise you do.

So I have exercised a bit of brain muscle－and it does not take much－to work out that the exercises on which you burn the least calories are the one that take the least effort and which you can do the longest. So you can imagine which ones I do.

Of course, my rivals have cottoned on to this, too, and one morning I realized that someone I had overtaken the night before had dragged himself out of bed and did some abs training and then some leg stretching for a total of 11 minutes, which burned up just 12 calories.

I have also found with this caper that it brings out the traits of leadership－call it pushiness if you like－in some people. On the evening of Lantern Festival on Feb 22 I treated myself to a big dinner and long, warm shower and slipped into bed about 10pm. Immediately the very assertive person who was in spot No. 1 and who is in the habit of poring over everybody's training record every day, got shirty when I told her I was giving my exercises a miss. She ordered me to get out of bed and do them.

When I told her it was a rest day in my training schedule－I lied－she told me to take a picture of the schedule to prove it. Even after admitting my guilt, pledging to exercise the next morning, she sent me a stream of warnings.

"It was wrong of you to lie. Do the training now; it's for your own good. You've set a goal for yourself, so stop being lazy. But it's up to you: go and eat and drink anything you like, but you're just going to get fatter and fatter."

After turning a deaf ear to his, and continuing to sleep for an hour, I finally crawled out of bed and did the exercises. It was past midnight when I finished.

Now even my mother is pushing me. I made the mistake of recommending the app to her, and now she is as obsessed as the rest of us, training every day. She checks my training record every evening, too, and if I haven't done it she starts putting the hard word on me.