Okay men, stop picking your nose and grunting for a minute, and listen up. I am going to talk to you about something extremely important that will be affecting all of us at one point or another in our lives — old age.

I am about to turn 22, and that frightens me. For the most part, I think that is because for many men, graduating means, among other things, that your body is starting to undergo a transformation from peak health to a six-foot-tall pile of gelatin.

I don’t want to be one of those mid-life men who appears to have had the Goodyear Blimp inflated inside of their abdomen. Nor do I want to be one of those men who strains his back or pulls his hamstring every time he reaches for the TV remote, and neither do you.

That means it’s time to take action and battle the effects of age before they set it. For most of us college men, that means a strict diet of fewer frozen pizzas and low-fat potato chips, and if you’re like me, it also means getting into the weight room.

The practice of weightlifting no doubt traces its roots to ancient Egyptian culture when men carried huge stones up several hundred feet while constructing pyramids.

Soon these men realized the repetitive lifting of these heavy stones made them much stronger than the average man. It was then they no doubt inscribed the universal truths we find inside of the pyramids in ancient hieroglyphics, which contrary to what scientists tell us, probably read something like, “Obscenely Big Muscles Help Pick Up Egyptian Chicks.”

Since then, men in every culture have lifted weights to stay in shape and tried to impress girls on Stairmasters.

I’ll be honest with you, I am not the kind of person you would call an intense weightlifter. I go to the rec to put in an honest day’s workout, then wake up in the middle of the night in the fetal position because every muscle in my body but my tongue is cramped.

I do have a friend, however, who describes himself as an “intense” weightlifter, which to me means someone who lifts weights or moves furniture more than twice a year.

To him, weightlifting is something you do every day. Last fall, he told me he could bench press 315 pounds, which is very impressive. But in case you are not “up” on weightlifting and cannot put 315 pounds into perspective, that’s approximately the equivalent of lifting 3,391 bags of low-fat Doritos.

Perhaps you have questions you want answers to before you will feel comfortable weightlifting. Allow me to attempt to answer your questions:

Q: How will I know when I have had a “good” workout?

A: You will know you have had a good workout when your muscles feel like a big, boiled lasagna noodle. You may experience difficulty performing some common tasks, such as lifting objects, stretching, or not flying off of the road and crashing into the Power Plant on your way home, for example.

Q: What muscles should I exercise the most?

A: Generally the current practice is to avoid working any muscle that has any practical use (the muscles used to open a jar of spaghetti, for example) and concentrate only on those muscles that are clearly visible

by some good-looking girl across the room on an exercise bike.

So I hope to see you men at the rec beating those years, and if you decide to start lifting, come say hello. I’ll be the one behind the stairmasters drooling into a bag of low-fat potato chips.

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Aaron Senneff is a senior in computer engineering from Bettendorf.