I find this...poppycock. Gyms are cheap!
It's a matter of priorities and motivation. I can sorta speak from experience. In March, I was 215, I've dropped to 185 (gained some muscle, I think, was 180 before I started doing complimentary lifting...) My gym membership is costing me only $27 a month cash, no contract (well there is, but you can cancel at any time by just writing saying you're cancelling.) In this gym, I get my ice skating rink I go to everyday for public session, a swimming pool, aerobic studio, cardio machines, weight machines, and free weights, and a basketball court. All for $27 a month. That's a steal.
Other gyms around here, Planet Fitness most notable, is $15 a month. Planet Fitness is for little girls, though, but still, my point stands. Other gyms aren't charging much anymore, YMCA is $20-30 a month, again, has a pool year round. That's actually really cheap for all that's offered, imo. Xbox live alone from Microsoft month to month is $8 a month, I know people who easily spent 30 a month just on Xbox live and DLC (like Rockband songs) every month, nevermind games they bought on release date or something for 60 a pop, or their new Android phone they just needed, etc.
Me, I love going to the gym. It's like sorta a playground for an adult to me. I don't look at it with the attitude of "I need to be in shape or else..." I just was like "sweet, a punching stand, I wanna punch and kick stuff." I ended up doing the punching stand to compliment skating, then ended up doing slideboard, bench jumping, and then eventually a little bit of weights (lower body stuff mostly) to compliment my ice skating. I found something I liked, and ran with it, more or less. I just show up to the gym in my jeans and tshirt, wave to the guy at the desk, and do my thing, whatever I feel like doing. Weightlifting, punch the hell out of the punching bag, slideboard, arm bike, play basketball with an 8 pound medicine ball basketball, whatever I feel like. To me the gym has become a "I'm bored" sorta activity, just like "I'm bored, I'll go the gym." It's really fun if you don't take yourself too seriously there, just pretend you're training to, I don't know...be Bruce Lee or something. I pretend I'm Baki the Grappler (anime character) a little bit when I go. Just have fun, or make it fun. A lot for me, was just finding exercises I liked. You couldn't make me do bicep curls or tricep curls, but I loved the punching bag. I also found out today I love Olympic style clean and jerk lifts. I did some reading, and I found out what everyone else at the gym was doing, bicep curls, etc, would be useless to me anyway, as I'm looking for strength alone, and am not trying to be a bodybuilder.
As far as personal trainers go, again, as I said above, not needed. I just tended to ask random people at the gym advice, but I also just did lots of reading. In this way, I think my NVLD was an advantage to me. My verbal IQ basically compensates for the rest of me, so it's very easy for me to acquire lots of knowledge about stuff and just sorta store it. I just spend time looking up lifting videos, reading about protein intake, etc. With skating, the same way, I've had like 40 minutes of coaching from a coach who was on the ice for her first time in a couple months after a car accident. That and some random old guy I asked for advice, well, gave me advice on what I was doing. Other than that, lots of reading and watching youtube, and I'm pretty much at the adult level 3/4 test level right now. It's just like any other skill you try to learn, you do lots of research then you do it, gurus, etc, are helpful, but it's not like a personal trainer is a god or anything. A lot of the time, a personal trainer is more of a "rent a friend" than anything. They can give good advice, but in the end, the best way to do things is research and tailor what you want personally for you.
As far as diet, yeah, the "trend" has been toward unhealthy foods. But really, healthy food is actually cheaper. You don't need super duper organic stuff from Whole Foods, just get real food. Brown rice is available at any grocery store for like a dollar a pound, a pound of rice usually has like...2 cups of rice? 2 cups of rice is 6 cups cooked. Same with legumes, dollar or less a pound, 3 pounds cooked. For green vegetables, again, cheap, cabbage is like 59c a pound. Even meat's not terribly expensive, it's like 2 bucks a pound for chicken. Once you learn to cook, a whole world opens to you.
It's a mixture of lack of motivation and lack of knowledge. I can go on and on. I was out of shape, and finally, I found something I liked and it helped me. There also just came a point where I was fed up with what I was eating, my mom would only buy processed food, and I gained weight and felt terrible. Finally I just learned to cook, and again, ran with it, now I can cook better than almost all of my friends (except for my friend who's Pakistani.)
I mean, the world around us sucks and is unfair, but I guess you just gotta learn to break the game instead of playing along with it.
Also, I mean, I think as far as school lunches, bad stuff. But really, the government subsidizes working out to a large extent. Just like a quarter mile of me down the street, there's a 3 mile walking trail and park. The trail is smooth enough to rollerblade on with no issues at all. There's one state park with a lake and waterfalls just at the other end of town, and there's parks all inbetween everywhere. All these parks are completely free. I mean no, it's not a Nordic track machine, but it's fun and actually enjoyable to go hiking like that. If you're just starting, hiking is perfect exercise to do. Even some parks that charge admission, like Killington Peak in Vermont, will let you hike them and mountain bike them for free if you don't take the gondola up the mountain. I find it amazing that you can just go see random mountains and waterfalls and stuff for free, and the government supports it enough so the grounds are clean and admission is free.
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However, after my whole post of "You're not trying hard enough, just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and toughen up!" I do have this to say. Schools and society in general don't do enough to make kids realize physical activities they like and are good at. When I was a kid, I actually tried hard to be athletic. I tried baseball, football, swimming, judo, and hockey. I liked judo and hockey the most. I failed at baseball and football, was OK at soccer, but didn't terribly like it, and at the time, my parents didn't have enough money for me to continue judo (it sucks, I would ranked up to the next belt after yellow if I stayed for another like 5 months) or get into hockey beyond the "learn to play" class. So what happened was, I had no drive to do anything athletic anymore, now that my sports were taken from me. School gym class just made me feel bad because it seemed to be all about things I couldn't do, that, and during the divorce my parents had, my mom's "cooking" consisted of giving us hot pockets compared to my dad who cooked only healthy food all the time, so my health suffered greatly.
I feel like, school especially, should try to train the kids on a more personal level. I also think school is sort of a somewhat necessary evil. Really, parents should be involved with their kids, and personally work with them on fitness, along with like, every other thing taught in school. But, because parents are irresponsible, the government has to step up and fill in and be a surrogate parent.
Anyway, school gym class, imo, should be more asking individual kids their fitness goals. What does the child like to do? What if the kid hates playing basketball with the kids in gym class, but loves martial arts? I think it'd be much better, hell, even more cost effective, if you just sorta worked gym class as a "fitness voucher" kind of program. Have the kids pick an activity they really wanna do, even something like traditionally "expensive" like figure skating, gymnastics, martial arts, and enroll them in the training for it with the education budget, then have their gym class be recommendations from their coach in that sport in either general training they can do with just the PE teachers supervision, or exercises to directly help in that sport or activity. That's partially why the USSR was so good athletically. In the USSR, while this is a super harsh and extreme version of what I'm describing, if a "scout" observed a kid that was good at something, the government would end up taking them off and paying for their training, just to compete nationally and internationally. Obviously Russia was brutal on athletes, so a middle ground would be sort of the ideal in my plan.
And for food in schools, ugh. I have a friend who came over here from Poland, in Poland he was skinny, fit, and cool, and here in USA, nerdy and fat. He said in Poland, the food at school lunches was great, and was served in a real bowl, etc. Real food, here, school lunch food is honestly only marginally better than prison food (having tried both.) The "food" served in school is no more "food" than cardboard is dietary fiber. I find the policies of banning bagged lunches in some schools simply appalling, too. If a school I sent my child to did that, and I couldn't resolve it with a note or talking to with the principal, I'd withdraw them.
But yeah, for adults, you're...adults. While giving out free gym memberships or whatever might help .001% of the population, we've already got tons of state and national parks that sit deserted because people don't use them. I highly doubt giving everyone free gym memberships would help anyone, because as an adult, since you're in control of your own destiny. If you don't got the motivation to spend 30 bucks a month on a gym membership and work out yourself, then I highly doubt the government or some outside force intervening would change the situation at all. However, as a kid, you're more or less, not in control of your own destiny. Adults are. So as adults, I feel like we have an obligation to keep kids fit and healthy.
I wish to say more on this issue, but really, it would have been so cool if I was allowed to just keep pursuing my athletic things I wanted to pursue as a kid. Now I'm an adult, and it's cool, I sorta...caught myself early. I feel like I'm playing catchup, though. I'm doing at 20 what should have been done at 13, and at least in my sport, at 20, you're almost too old to start or be at all serious about it. Most people quit around my age, and I'm just starting. It's tough. I really wish my mother, even if she couldn't keep me playing hockey, just took me to public skate and spent $5 on public skate once in a while, like once a month or whatever. I guess everything works out, I mean, going with the Bible verse of "God makes all things work for good for those who love him." I guess things are working out better, and God is a great contingency planner, but still, it's tough not to entertain thoughts about how great I would have been at whatever if I just started earlier.
Oh well, sorry for my long essaylike post. oops.
13 Oct 2011, 4:44 pm
Even within CT there are very expensive places to live and very, very cheap places to live.
