WICHITA, Kan. — Did you work out today? No?

Don’t bother racking your brain for an excuse.

If you don’t feel like exercising, just admit it — or get over it. The staff at your gym truly does not want to hear that you can’t work out because your cat stubbed its toe.

That’s only one of many silly excuses that would-be exercisers have given to fitness experts.

“Some people actually come straight out and say, ‘I’m just lazy’ or ‘I hate exercise,’ ” said P.J. Barrett, director of wellness and personal training at the East Branch YMCA.

But others aren’t nearly that direct.

“People will find any excuse that they can if they’re looking for one,” said Colette Gorges, fitness director at Fitness 2000. “They just do. They’ll use anything.”

“It almost does become comical after a while,” Barrett said.

Jessica Tarbell, metro fitness and health director at the Greater Wichita YMCA, hears a lot about the parking lot. People tell her they don’t feel like exercising because they have to park too far away at the gym. God forbid they have to take a few extra steps on their way to a workout.

“It’s like, ‘I want to park as close as I can to the front door, but when I get in here, I’m going to get on the treadmill and walk five miles,’ ” Tarbell said.

Sometimes reality television gets in the way of a gym member’s reality.

“People will say, ‘I have to stay home and watch ‘Survivor’ or ‘American Idol,’ ” Gorges said.

Weather of all types can keep many people away from a workout. Others claim they can’t possibly exercise during holiday seasons, vacations or when the kids are out of school.

Some use a simple case of the sniffles as a reason to stay on the couch.

“You don’t want to work out when you’re truly under the weather, but if it’s just a little cold, you kind of have to ask yourself, ‘OK, am I really that sick?’ ” Tarbell said.

“One time a lady told me her garage door wouldn’t come up,” said Wendy Williamson, a senior-level trainer at Genesis Health Clubs.

Williamson says people will come up with all kinds of excuses if they’re working out just to please someone else.

“They have to want to do it for themselves,” she said.

Williamson recalls one gym member who found a creative way to get around her husband pressuring her to work out. “She really wasn’t interested, but she knew if she told him she didn’t go, he’d be upset with her,” Williamson said. So instead of going to the gym, she just took her workout clothes out of her drawer and put them in the laundry hamper so her husband would assume that she had worked out.

“I’ve heard the excuse that people are too old to exercise, and that’s completely ridiculous,” said Tracy Lerch of Lerch Personal Fitness. “The older people get, they really need to be doing something so that functionally they can take care of themselves on a daily basis.”

Some say they can’t exercise because they smoke.

“That’s ridiculous,” Tarbell said. Those smokers are saying, “I’m going to use one bad behavior to prevent me from doing any type of good behaviors.”

But the scapegoats our fitness experts seem to hear about the most are pets.

“I can’t come in,” a client told Williamson one day. Why is that?

“My cat threw up. I’ve got to clean that up.”

“You can’t clean it up and get here in the next 10 minutes?” Williamson said she told that client.