Fitness Success: nothing less than utter and complete physical transformation
8 May 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been working hard on a series of future articles for this site and thought for sure I’d have one in particular completed today. As is often the case in Marty World, things didn’t quite work out as I’d initially expected. My problem is this: any topic meaty enough to move me to write about often takes on a life of its own once I get going. Tolstoy once said that even though he wrote Anna Karina he didn’t know she was going to throw herself under that train until she jumped in the climactic scene. Rather than think the story all the way through then write it, Tolstoy, in an improvisational tour de force, wrote the story as it initially unfolded in his mind’s eye. As his imagination revealed the next twist or turn, he wrote it down in real time. He was quite surprised at how the story turned out. This obtuse reference illustrates how I write my weekly blurbs and ruminations posted on this site. My articles are the outgrowth of mental improvisations; I don’t know where they will eventually lead when I actually start typing. I cannot predict how much data download is going to occur on a particular topic and what starts off as a single idea, phrase or sentence can often end up running 2,500 to 3,000 words (or more) before I’ve exhausted the topic. My friend and partner Lee says, “Marty, just crank out 500-600 words and be done with it for that particular day.” More often than not, if I’m moved enough to write 500 words on a topic no doubt there’s a lot more that needs to be said if all the possibilities are to be examined thoroughly and intelligently.
People want more and deserve more. In the world of mainstream fitness, intelligent people are spoon-fed a bland pabulum of homogenized gruel. Ineffectual softball tactics abound and are touted as revolutionary. One grizzled Iron Immortal, a personal friend, summed it up. “It’s the feminization of fitness Marty. A bunch of metro-sexual personal trainers serve up the next fad method or product to a bunch of people with money. It’s an incestuous relationship: the clients know that they should be doing something about the terrible condition of their body – but they don’t want to do the really hard work required to make substantive changes in their physiques.” In the old Soviet Union, state factory workers had a running joke, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” In fitness world this cliché takes on a slightly different flavor: “They (fitness gurus) provide us pretend methods and we pretend to workout.” In return for giving the personal trainer a $70-100 per hour, the ‘expert’ will tell you how great you’re doing…fitness absolution bestowed by an expert. You get to feel good that you’re “doing” something” about the terrible physical condition you find yourself in and the PT feels better because you make their monthly car payment. Eventually feeling good about mythical “progress” doesn’t outweigh the sheer amount of dough shelled out each month and the trainee quits. That’s okay; the metro-slickster just finds another gullible mark to replace the lost client. As PT Barnum said, “there’s a new sucker born every minute.” Anytime a fitness guru wants to deemphasize tangible, measurable objective results and substitute concrete results with subjective emotions you are being jived and set up for failure. It’s seductive to be told how easy physical process renovation can be – simply purchase a particular product or mode and magically shortcut all that excruciatingly hard work required to trigger true change. In the end none of the miracle pills, potions, modes or methods do a damned thing.
Some modes and methods are effective. Some tactics and tools have been battletested by the athletic elite for decades. Effective fitness methods, the kind that result in tangible results, are only effective when set in motion with diligence, tenacity, patience and sheer gut-busting physical effort. People don’t want to hear that. People want to be told that there is an easier way; for a price they can purchase that dream body. Unless you resort to surgical procedures, transformation requires disciplined eating and hard physical training. I am privy to quite a few effective tactics and when some incident or event sparks a blurb idea, likely there is a lot to say. I try and answer in every column: who, what, where, when how and why. Often the gap between conception and fruition is lengthier than first anticipated. As my old martial arts teacher used to say, “One effective tactic taken deep into the trainee’s marrow is better than one hundred tactics done superficially. Better to be an inch wide and a mile deep than a mile wide and an inch deep!” Sometimes my improvisational fitness solo efforts take a little longer to create than I first predicted. I hope the quality of the final finished product is worth the wait. Our goal is to provide serious people with effective, proven methods, modes, tactics and philosophies: we’ll never tell you that the transformational process can be made easy – we’ll tell you that real renovation as absolutely achievable – assuming you train smart and train hard.
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