How to get fit at home: use your car!

If you're anything like us, the next few weeks will see you spending quite a decent chunk of time at home, on your couch, contemplating your pudginess and paucity of activity. We assume, looking at our local supermarket, that some of you will be doing said contemplating from a toilet-paper throne as you gaze across a cornucopia of flour and long-life milk, but that's something we can admonish each other for another time. The pressing concern here is that we're all going to emerge from quarantine looking like the people in Wall-E – unless, of course, we do something about our physical condition.

With gyms, sports clubs and pools off limits for the foreseeable, you might be wondering what you can do to stave off incipient John Candyism. And, because we'll never pass up an opportunity to dispense the most flippant and tenuous of advice, allow us to submit, for your delectation, our plan: use your car to get fit.

Allow us to explain...

No, it’s not because you’ll be talking to your family over Skype, using your hands in lieu of punctuation from now on. It’s because, if your experience with a Giulia QV* was anything like ours, you’ll be screaming and gesticulating wildly at the gods themselves as your 500bhp QV sits outside, forlornly, in limp-home mode. Nothing tones up those triceps like a tantrum!

* Other Alfas are available, which are sure to cause just as much misery. We had a 147 GTA that could tone and firm up a Dumbo-sized set of bingo wings in a fortnight with this method.

Should your Tesla Model X's doors malfunction, you’re left with a pair of gullwings that function about as well as we do after our 10th pint. You know what that means, right? No, not a crushing hangover. Well, OK, yes, definitely a crushing hangover. And some unexplained Chicken Cottage boxes in our lounge room. But we’re talking about the broken gullwing doors – or, should we say, impromptu lat-pulldown machines? Yeah, you’re welcome.

True story: back in high school, when pranks were the highest form of wit, we used to pick up one of the student’s cars, carry it somewhere else and wait for said student to return, keys in hand, wearing a bemused look as they tried to work out why their car was on the other side of the car park from where they left it. OK, we weren’t exactly going to headline the Edinburgh Comedy Festival with wit like that, but it was enough for us to fall down laughing.

And that’s the thing – exercising should be a good time. So if your neighbour has a lightweight car, pull on a pair of latex gloves and get to work on your leg muscles and your funny bone at the same time!*

*Top Gear accepts no responsibility for any and all prosecutions/scornful looks doled out if your neighbour catches you trying to carry their car away.

Fact: we're going to need even more delivery riders than before, now that we're all staying at home with laptops and Netflix.

Another fact: F1 drivers use complex machinery to hone and test their reflexes. No need, say us – just hop on a scooter and survive the melee that is about to besiege your home town as Deliveroo riders outnumber anything else on the road. More advanced training can extend to wet-weather days, or the 7:30pm dinner rush. Extra benefit? With so many of you out there, providing this vital service, we will get our duck pancakes with hoi sin sauce even faster. And we thank you in advance.

Another cold, hard fact of life as we're living it: we need trucks. So, if any of you out there have the licence, the time and the inclination, there's a way that we can all benefit from your vital contribution. But here's the sweetener for you – your arms will never look better. Allow us to explain.

One of the most important things any bodybuilder will ever tell you – apart from the best place to source HGH and the most appealing way to eat chicken and rice four times a day – is that to get massive gainz, you have to isolate your muscle groups. In the past, we’ve tried to isolate our muscles in the usual British way – not talking to them, pretending they don’t exist, gentrifying their neighbourhood and forcing them to relocate – with no success.

But then, like a 15-tonne angel, a 1980s Scania truck appeared from the gloom. With an eighteen-speed, manual gearbox and no synchromesh, there’s an endless supply of forearm-flexing goodness on the horizon, just to thread your way through a medium-sized town.

Because, as everyone knows, you can’t own a G63 AMG without also possessing three key ingredients:

a. gigantic biceps,
b. a strangely thin, tight-fitting and deep-V-necked t-shirt, and
c. more hairplugs than Rob Brydon.

So what’s a man to do? Well, we presume that, as you've already spent more time in the gym than the people who work there, you're on a first-name basis at the Belgravia Clinic and you have a tanning bed/assorted fitness paraphernalia in your house, all that's left to do is lament the fact that you can't buy more bedazzled, deep-V-neck shirts at your nearest G-Star Raw store.

Because everyone knows that the only way to target those muscles properly is to shrug. Why not consult the shruggiest people to ever walk the earth?

And, if we’re consulting the French, why don’t we fully embrace this lazy, somehwat crass stereotype with some crusty bread, Bordeaux*, gitanes** and the finest car ever to emerge from la terre de France: the Citroen DS. We’ve chosen the limited-run convertible version, just for l’enfer of it. So when you need to head out for supplies, do so with absolute style and grace – lord knows there won’t be much of that to be found at the supermarket – and shrug in that stereotypically Gallic way as you waft along the eerily empty streets.

You can also practice around the house – shrug when you watch the news. Shrug when your teleconferencing call with your office doesn't work. Shrug when your significant other comes back from the shops and says that, for whatever reason drives these irrational idiots, someone has panic-bought the entire supply of Walkers shortbread.

* We do not recommend drinking and driving 
** Please don’t smoke. You never look as insouciant as you think you do. Also, y’know, health reasons

Modern F1 cars pull up to eight lateral g in corners. Modern men pull exactly zero girls by reciting this fact. On the other hand, men with uncomfortably close-cropped hair and bulging, sinewy necks do seem to keep pulling.

So why not even the playing field by taking a leaf out of their book? No, not the V-neck T-shirt so deep that it approaches decolletage – the tree-trunkish, vaguely thrombotic bridge between their head and body.

An F1 car seems to be the obvious choice for this, but that’s kind of like starting your get-fit routine by running an ultramarathon. Better to use your allowed once-a-day fitness outing to do a few laps around the local park, no? Or, better yet, a few laps around Donington Park – preferably in something that’s up to the task. The Dallara Stradale can pull 2g (if you ask it nicely), which will make your head weigh exactly twice what it does at the moment, but sideways. Yes, our technical expertise knows no bounds.

This one’s pretty rudimentary. Just spend a year daily-driving a Lotus Exige and tell us that you haven’t got the kind of abdominal muscles that’d get you on the cover of whichever fitness magazine that men buy, rather than putting down the burger and actually doing a few push-ups.

As an added bonus, the Exige’s... focused ride will highlight any spare flab you might be carrying around your midsection and encourage you to embrace an all-lettuce diet.

If you're lucky enough to have a classic car in your garage – or indeed, if you're lucky enough to have a garage – now is the perfect time to do some loving restoration / long-overdue maintenance on your car. So, order in some tools, fluids, filters, workshop manuals and tomes of supplication to the motoring gods and get to work.

We guarantee that in no time, there will be a bolt, screw or nut that will require every last bit of your grip strength – and patience – to undo. So get an early start and build up that grip strength on the easy ones, then tackle the problem child (which is also the name of our upcoming parenting book) with your newly powerful mitts.