The No Gym Workout

What's more fitting than starting October by spending the morning driving through the fog?

I just had a great morning session, admittedly inspired by last night's Biggest Loser.

You see, on last night's show, all the contestants went on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. They camped outside, except for one lucky couple that won the contest to spend the trip in an RV. Everyone was outside in an area that is just one big nature hike. They were also given medicine balls and resistance bands. And do you know what they did?

Nothing!

That did virtually no exercise because they all thought they needed their gym. This is one of the biggest reasons I don't like gyms - people begin to think that they can't exercise without them. But make no mistake about it, we were much healthier before gyms were ever even conceived.

This morning, I took my clients through a bodyweight only workout. They didn't even get medicine balls or resistance bands. It was just them and their desire to work hard. The sheer number of exercises you can do without any equipment at all makes me wonder what was going on in the minds of the contestants. No one thought of doing some pushups, squats or wind sprints?

When the contestants got back to the ranch, Bob and Jill were both amazed that they did so little on their road trip. It made sense to me - virtually every exercise montage I see on the show involves the contestants on treadmills and using barbells and machines with weight stacks. Granted, they are exercising so much that they must be doing some exercise that involves just bodyweight, but it certainly doesn't appear to be the most common method used.

If you're thinking about investing in a gym membership, I strongly encourage you to reconsider. You're wasting money. Instead, invest in some resistance bands and a couple dumbbells. Or heck, don't buy any equipment at all - you don't need it, but sometimes it's nice to have to vary up the exercise a little bit. Gym memberships don't provide you with any accountability or education, which are the two biggest obstacles to everyone's fitness. Health clubs are more than happy to take your money, even if you get no results and never show up (which is how it works for most people).

If everyone took the time to learn some basic bodyweight exercises and kept one another accountable to their goals, gyms would become obsolete in no time. And to be honest, I'd be okay with that. It's worth noting that I oftentimes work out in the weight room of the school where I coach. It's also worth noting that you should always make exercise enjoyable, and if you enjoy working out at the gym, do it.

Whatever you do for exercise, make sure that a) you get your money's worth, and b) you do it!

This Week In Weight Loss

So after watching the season premier of The Office last night, entitled "Weight Loss," I decided that I needed to do a rundown of a couple of my favorite TV shows that dealt with weight loss. Read on... I promise there's something to take from these shows.

It was week two of the Biggest Loser, and as was historically the case, the contestants lost nowhere near the amount of weight they lost in week one. Week two is always a tough one on the show because the contestants are hitting plateaus. Their bodies have been through so much over their brief time on the show that they are fighting for what our bodies always seek - stasis.

I say this a lot, and because the words "stasis" and "equilibrium" sound kind of boring, I sense people gloss over a bit. But if you have weight loss goals, you must have the fundamental understanding that your body wants things to stay exactly as they are at this moment. This is why I preach intense exercise. Your body is only going to adapt if you give it a big enough challenge. You can't just give it a gentle nudge - you have to shove the thing with all you've got.

Getting back to where I started - The Office - I had a great time watching the characters try to lose weight. Their strategies more or less amount to starvation and sweating off weight. Now I realize that this is a fictional comedy show, but the reality of the situation is that our country has more or less the same ideas about weight loss - we really don't know up from down.

We as a country sink millions of dollars into pills, diet plans and ab machines. The Office was clearly making fun of this fact, but it is somewhat troubling that most people don't know the role simple physics plays in weight loss or how to exercise without having a gym membership or a treadmill. We don't understand how simple it all is.

That's one of the main reasons I have this blog. Having success in fitness is far from complicated, and I want to help people see that. Make sure that if you have a question about anything fitness related, you leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

And with that, have a great weekend!

The Biggest Loser

So for those of you who don't know much about the show, the Biggest Loser is a weight loss competition reality show on NBC. The new season started last night.

If you haven't seen the show, I really recommend it. I always feel like there's a million things I want to talk about, both praise and critique. I barely even know where to start (I feel like I could blog every day for the next week about the first show alone).

I guess I'll play glass is half empty this morning and go with critique. Many people who watch this show desire to emulate what the contestants are doing, so this show has a huge influence over the exercise habits of many Americans.

Last night, they debuted their new gym. It's twice as large as any of the gyms they've had in the past. They dubbed it "state of the art."

That's something that I always have a problem with. The fitness industry, especially health clubs, spend a lot of time and money trying to convince us that they're state of the art - that better equipment is the answer to better fitness. But you don't need fancy machines to be fit. In fact, the simple concept that technology is a viable means of achieving fitness is absurd.

Think about it - technology has allowed us as a society to become lazy. It makes our day to day lives easy, and it gives us the option of being sedentary. And we're supposed to believe that more technology is the solution?

You shouldn't be using the same tool that created a problem to solve it. What's the saying again about insanity? Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results?

Fellow fitness pro Juan Carlos Santana says it very well in the September issue of Men's Health magazine:

"Don’t use a hammer for everything. Instead, use the right tool for the right job. Nothing is ever the next big thing; someone’s just found another screwdriver."

For our purposes: don't pretend that a thousand plus dollar health club treadmill is somehow better than a track and your Nikes.

I'm not totally adverse to running on a treadmill now and again, but if you think technology (by definition, something that exists to make things easier for you) is the best tool to get you in shape (by definition, something that requires you make things hard on yourself) then you're bordering on an Eskimo buying ice.

We all have plenty of technology in our lives. We don't need to make it a part of our exercise.