Who are the gym people? Those people would be the personal trainers, body builders, the aerobics and spinning instructors at our local gyms. They are the often tanned and energetic people who hang out and work at the gyms we are so familiar with. We tend to envy these folks. These people represent the cutting edge of our contemporary fitness culture. I refer to them generally as the “gym people”. They also tend to love the gym. Gym people work and thrive in their fitness world. They know their business well and are extremely comfortable with it. The gym people are the instructors and guides in the foreign territory that represents our modern fitness industry.
Like all of us, Gym people love being appreciated. They enjoy the attention they receive for looking better physically than most of us. Indeed, they are exclusive members of their own fraternity of people who are evidently sexier, stronger, younger looking and healthier than the rest of us. They are what we wish to be physically. We pay for their guidance and help. They know very well that they represent the “beauty and fitness” ideal that most of the regular people who enter the gym wish to attain. They are personifications of our goals. They teach spinning classes and train people on weights and seem to know first-hand the best “state of the art” path to physical perfection.
Let’s just think for a second about how truly ridiculous this phenomenon really is. As a personal trainer in a popular gym you could easily be a high school drop-out or have very little formal education. Yet, your every word and command is followed meticulously by neurosurgeons, presidents of companies, judges, and various other professionals who come into the gym looking for your guidance because they are out of shape and you are not. All of this takes place within a health and fitness industry with no real enforced regulations or guidelines. This is where the latest exercise or supplement fad, like so much snake oil changes almost daily. There is an incredible amount of money being exchanged but very little credibility. Given the statistics, results are conspicuously absent as well.
Why? Aside from looking good physically, what is it that Gym people actually do? They push metal stacks of weight on a number of large machines using simple body movements, many times per week. They run on treadmills and ride stationary bikes. They do meaningless and repetitive aerobic exercise movements for hours. Why do they commit themselves to these repetitive and seemingly meaningless movements for endless days, months and years?
They do this work because they love what it brings to them. It maintains and improves their status in their world of fitness. It makes them stronger, sexier, and physically better than the rest of us. It gives them purpose. It defines them. It permits and retains their membership in their own exclusive group. They are not bad people. They are simply driven by the basic human emotions and motivations that drive us all.
Gym people will often complete 40 sets of weight lifting 2 hours per day, 6 days per week in the same gym over and over again. This provides them with huge emotional and social benefit. For those who personally train others, it also provides monetary benefit. For these people, these activities work. Popular culture and our society have declared the gym people, their methods and the fitness industry they comprise as the winners in the race to find the best way to get from fat to fit and muscular.
They are wrong. That is, to get from your current physical state to that you wish to be in – these popular methods are mostly ineffective. Gym people spend most of their time in and around the gym. Their activities definitely keep them in good shape, but it is purely the psychological and emotional rewards that keep them repeating this long hard and repetitive work. This arduous and high volume road to fitness is perfect for them, but obviously not for the rest of us.
In fact, this path delivers very few of us to the physical destination we wish to arrive at. Yet, in attempting to reach our physical goals, you would think that only they have the map. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the lie that must be understood and avoided. This is a fallacy that must be exposed for anyone to begin to succeed.
Please open up your imagination to the wonderful and almost endless choices available when it comes to moving your body. Get out of the gym and do something FUN! Regarding physical exercise – you are in control. You do not need to pay someone at a big gym tell you that you must do one of their boring, difficult, repetitious, meaningless workouts on their terms. Break free of these fitness industry shackles and do something you truly enjoy. Once you do, you will be on the road to permanent success.
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