She made her do what?
Michelle Obama recently critiqued Ellen DeGeneres for making her participate in a particularly demanding activity on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” back in 2012.
Obama, 61, recalled the incident during an appearance on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast this week amid a discussion about aging.
“I’m at the age where I’ll wake up and my shoulder is sore,” the former first lady told the comedian on Tuesday.
“Don’t get me started,” Poehler, 53, replied. “I had frozen shoulder a couple of years ago. And guess what? Nobody knows what causes it, and there’s nothing you can do about it, like every ailment for women in their fifties.”
Their conversation then shifted to push-ups, with Obama mentioning how DeGeneres, 67, had challenged her to a push-up contest on the talk show 13 years ago.
“Now I do them on my knees,” Obama began. “This is another thing. I don’t need to do regular push-ups. I have nothing to prove. I can, but it’s hard. My arm length doesn’t go all the way down.”
“You know who pointed that out was Ellen, because in my first term, she challenged me to a push-up competition,” she continued. “I’m the first lady, you know. And she heard that I worked out.”
Despite being the first lady at the time, Obama still agreed to the contest.
“So I’m on her show doing push-ups, and I did more push-ups than her, but she still says I didn’t go down all the way,” the “Becoming” author explained. “Anatomically, I don’t think I can. My arms are very long, and she’s a much smaller person than me.”
DeGeneres challenged the then-first lady to the contest during a February 2012 episode of her talk show.
The pair was discussing Obama’s morning workout routine when the comic confronted her about how many push-ups she could do.
“I was just wondering if you could do more push-ups than I could do,” DeGeneres said, per a clip from the episode.
“You know, it depends on how your back is,” Obama teased. “I know you’ve got these back issues.”
Obama ultimately won the competition after completing 25 push-ups.
Obama would return to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” several times before the show went off the air in 2022 following an investigation into toxic workplace allegations.
Since then, DeGeneres has kept a relatively low profile.
She and her wife, actress Portia de Rossi, left the US for the UK back in November and have settled into a sprawling $18 million farmhouse in the Cotswolds – an affluent neighborhood in South West England.
As for the former first lady, she and her hubby, former President Barack Obama, 63, have been dogged by divorce rumors after 33 years of marriage, although she made a point to dispel those rumors last month.
“And that’s the thing that we as women struggle with – disappointing people,” Michelle said on April 9 during Sophia Bush’s “Work in Progress” podcast.
“So much so that people, they couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself,” she added at the time, “that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing.”
