I’m not sure just how I wound up taking a semester of rope skipping to fulfill my 1960s-something college freshman physical education requirement. Suffice it to say that once I found myself in this unwelcome circumstance, I accepted my fate and determined to give it my best shot.

I’m glad I did. By the end of the term I could do “trades,” “crossovers” and a variety of other rope-jumping tricks at high speed. And I was in great shape, because it turns out that skipping rope is one of the best overall conditioners.

Fast-forward 35 years and, in considerably worse shape than I was in college, I’m walking through the Oakland (California) Museum’s “White Elephant Sale.” Held in a huge warehouse, this annual fundraiser sports donated items ranging from a 50-foot solid mahogany sailboat to Tupperware without lids. But most prominent, occupying about one-third of an acre of the floor, was a maze of home-exercise equipment.

Donated by people who had “outgrown” their need for the exercise, the equipment presumably once facilitated, the items ran the gamut from treadmills, rowing machines, exercycles, ellipticals, “spinning bikes” and the ever-popular “vibration trainers” to apparatuses that, with their wires and poles going every which way, are really difficult to describe but come under the general heading “home gyms.”

Little of this equipment existed in the 1960s – or at least it was seldom found in people’s homes. Gyms were attached to schools, and mostly used by students, though they were sometimes open to the public as night-school facilities. Few gyms, even at colleges, had prototypes of the high-tech equipment that has become ubiquitous today. In the weight room, one lifted weights.

Then, between the 1960s and 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in all sorts of physical activities. Backpacking, jogging and “cross training” became commonplace.

Accompanying this renewed interest in physical culture – there had been similar developments in the 1890s and 1920s – was a parallel explosion in the variety and quantity of “sports equipment.” Suddenly, the all-purpose “sneaker” morphed into 40 types of expensive athletic shoes. Every activity “required” its own uniform, machinery, specialized storage rack – all pricey. And of course there was the proliferation of home gym equipment mentioned above.

All of this would be good and well but for two factors:

Manufacturing all that athletic equipment, much of which is used for a short time and then discarded, is hard on the environment.

The equipment doesn’t seem to be getting us in shape ... there are more obese Americans today than at any time in our past.

What gives?

I think, as with many aspects of our material culture, our “sporting goods” fetish has led us down a false path. We’ve bought into the fantasy that we can develop healthy bodies by owning more stuff rather than by actually working out.

On the former, we spend money, getting the temporary satisfaction of owning yet another thing – though in and of itself it does nothing for our health. On the ladder, we must spend time, but that time rewards us with weight loss, increased vigor and an improved self-image.

As someone who has achieved his weight-loss and conditioning goals in the last six months, I can assure that you don’t need a $500 to $2,500 piece of home gym equipment, $150 shoes or special clothes to get in shape.

To lose weight, I rode my bike a lot. My bike’s not particularly expensive, as bikes go, and I use it for about half of my transportation, so I don’t consider it a dedicated “exercise machine.” Other than the needed safety equipment – a helmet and some bright-colored T-shirts – I own no special bicycling gear. I ride in jeans and “sneakers,” the same “uniform” I wear for yard work and organic gardening that improves my strength and diet.

I seldom skip rope these days; it strains my aging knees. But by investing under $5 in a piece of rope and some tape to bind its ends as “handles,” you can skip rope at your ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.