There was an article in Best Life Magazine entitled Is Your Workout Wasting Your Time? that caught my eye:
On a recent afternoon, it [the health club] thrummed with activity: Men and women logged obedient noiseless reps on a range of machines; runners banged out the miles on treadmills; and one gal raced away on an elliptical machine, legs neither running nor swinging, but doing something inexplicable in a feverish Road Runner–like blur. It’s a vision of exercise utopia that is mirrored in gyms across the country. Except that a growing chorus of critics find fault with it: The man jackknifed into the leg-extension machine could be risking knee injury; the exercisers slaving away on other stationary machines are building individual muscles in place of whole-body strength; the people slogging away on the treadmills with their eyes glued to TV screens seem like automatons.
I go to the gym everyday and get everything done in about 30 minutes: just pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups. Done. No fancy-electric-cardio machines, no complex weight machines with instructions. I had been doing some bench-press and leg-press recently, but I’m cutting it out and adding squats and dumb-bell exercises. (p.s. Cardio is either outdoor runs or team-sports.)
The Best Life article warning against fitness club machines confirms what I’ve been experiencing recently: I get a better workout doing thoughtful, simple things.
I am a little frustrated that I pay $24/mo for the gym membership (the cheapest I could find) and don’t use any of the fancy equipment … but it’s still cheaper than trying to buy even a few weights, bars, and benches.
The article does mentions that some gyms are getting rid of the fancy equipment and charging less:
…exercisers are looking for salvation outside the proverbial box. To build Revolution Defense and Fitness, a small commercial gym tucked away in a light industry business park in suburban Minneapolis, Damian Hirtz spent about as much on gear as the typical health club spends on its pec deck. Hirtz’s low-tech fitness center is an affiliate of CrossFit and has a climbing rope, kettlebells, medicine balls, jump ropes, a set of heavy bags, a set of big plates, and a chin-up station made from galvanized pipe he admits he bought in the plumbing aisle at Home Depot. That’s about it. No machines, no mirrors, no benches.
Although such a simple gym can’t charge as much on memberships, it would also require less capital (no fancy stuff to buy) and more personal trainers (to explain different free-weight exercises) with nice personal training margins. Could be nicely profitable (in addition to more effective for the customer).
This post reminded me of a gym in my hometown called ‘The Next Big Thing’ based completely around using kettleballs (unevenly-weighted-dumb-bells):
Shaped like a cannon ball with a handle, Kettlebells at first seem more cumbersome than dumbbells. The weight of dumbbells is evenly distributed and doesn’t force grip strength, but the bottom-heavy Kettlebells are designed to hang down and move ‘ballistically,’ requiring the use of more stabilizing muscles, the way the body was meant to move.
Prediction: the no-machines-necessary mentality will be catching and no-machine gyms will indeed be the next big thing. Whichever chain figures out the best model of teaching will win.
