My parents are visiting me this month, and somehow we were randomly chatting about nursery rhymes. There was a particular one that we vaguely remembered but couldn’t recall the lyrics of – “Exercise is really great.” After struggling to remember it for a while, and then googling the name and failing to find anything, we remembered… my childhood audio cassette! When I was a kid, my parents would ask me to recite the songs and nursery rhymes I had learned and recorded them. Well, we did have an MP3 version of the cassette. Alas, my mom said we hadn’t actually recorded this particular song. A few minutes later, while I was annoying my wife with the MP3 of my childhood cassette, my mom jumped up out of her chair – the song was on it!

Just so that these lyrics can enter the corpus of text on the Internet, here it is (probably with some errors):

Exercise is really great
It's my way to keep in shape
Run or jump or dance or swim
Keep my body fit and slim

Makes my muscles firm and strong
So I live my life real long
I can make my mind strong too
These are things that I can do

Read good books or write a poem
Ask tough questions be alert
Think real hard it doesn't hurt

Yeah, I don’t know how good it is, but it’s nice to know the words won’t be lost forever. If you want to give it a shot, it’s sung to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star :)