Trick yourself into exercising
20 January 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Trick your self into exercising was the title of an article posted on a big-time fitness site today and it illustrates just whats wrong with the mainstream fitness industry. In my mind there are two distinct fitness industries: the mainstream fitness industry is corporate and huge and conventional and about as hip as your father favorite cardigan sweater and pipe. Safe as milk, tame, sensible in the worst sense of the word, this segment of the fitness industry recommends cardio activities like gardening and mall walking. They feel that a pushup is potentially injurious and caution against, overdoing it. Injury and safety and moderation are really huge and important to this definable market. Aimed at normal folks, the corporate giants that back this milquetoast approach want you to feel good about yourself. We all know that moderation and being sensible yields moderate sensible results, i.e., nothing of the slightest significance. The human body does not radically reconfigure itself in response to sensible mall walking or sane gardeningthe human body reconfigures itself only when subjected to intense progressive resistance training done with enough intensity to trigger the adaptive response that manifests itself in hypertrophy. The human body gives up body fat begrudgingly and only in a negative energy balance situation. To grow and strengthen muscle, to oxidize and burn off body fat requires intense sustained effort. Period. Anyone who has embarked on a serious fitness effort knows and appreciates the cold hard truth of this biological fact of life. At the other end of the fitness spectrum are the muscle mags that display steroid freaks and whore products using the bogus rational that over-the-counter products will allow the reader to obtain the freak body. This is aimed at males between the ages of 14 and 40. The fact of the matter is the bodies displayed were built by spending 25 hours a week in the gym, eating with more precision than a NASA space shot. The freaks ingest the cash equivalent in drugs of what readers of this drivel make in a year.
The mainstream website that ran the article on tricking yourself to exercise was sponsored (without the slightest hint of irony or humor) by the largest maker of CHEESE in the world. How you weave cheese into a fitness article without resorting to humor requires the tunnel vision of a Red Guard political commissar during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Yet here it lay, ready for Marty to tee-up: trick yourself into exercising and eat cheese to amplify results, all said with great gravitas and pompous somber intonation. The idea was based on the unspoken mainstream premise that exercise is hateful; unpaid manual labor, drudgery and something done with apprehension and dread, akin to weekly visits to the dentist for a root canal. Yet, the mainstream editors of these softball publications pontificate, exercise MUST be done! It is good for us. We need it and we can trick ourselves into doing it (and obtain immeasurable benefit) by easing into six activities. In week one the tricking commences with walking for 15-minutes. This is pretty brutal stuff so wait until week two to add ten minutes of light stretching. (Be sure not to rip, tear or dislocate anything) In week three work the lower body by doing some lunges on a stairway they advocate using a stairway to make the lunging easier. As if they were tough to begin with. Things really heat up in week four when you work the upper body by leaning onto a wall and doing a modified pushups a regular pushup might tear a persons rotator cuff loose from the clavicles so lets not go crazy and do a real push-up. Would you drive a speeding car into a brick wall at top speed? No, of course not so why do a regular pushup that could inflict cataclysmic trauma to the body. Be sensible, be safe, be sane. In week five we kick it up a notch by walking up or down a hill for 15-minutes. I think they were a little negligent by neglecting to mention that you should carry a cell phone in case something injurious occurs and you need to call 911. In week six (mercifully) you relax yourself by spending 5-minutes releasing tension by rolling your neck, hips and waist in gentle circles. Whew! It wears me out just writing about it! The article ends with this statement: With just a few weeks of exercise, you could be well on your way to a fitter, stronger, slimmer you. I am quite sure their fleet of corporate attorneys vetted and parsed this phraseology with a fine toothed comb. This site attracts tens of thousands of viewers who want desperately to believe that such nonsense can and will actually produce results. How sad and pathetic for the gullible reader how deceitful and callous on the part of the site product whores. Comments?
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