Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your "shovelglove." Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays. Baffled? Intrigued? Charmed? Discuss here.
I was reading about parkours (=freerunning) in the New Yorker this weekend, and was interested to read about George Hébert, a turn of the century French "sports theorist" (doesn't that sound so much better than "fitness guru?").
His most famous saying was, "Etre fort pour être utile" - "Be strong to be useful," which as far as I can tell, was the first "sports theory" expression of the idea of functional fitness. So I guess, in a purely linguistic sense at least, shovelglove's "useful" movements takes precedent over "functional" fitness.
