The Sporadic Diary

March 20, 2011

I just came home from the gym, which, if I had said that thirty-five years ago, you’d assume I had been playing basketball.  And you would have been right.  Now you say the word “gym” and it means the fitness club.  My gym, like gyms everywhere, is filled with treadmills, elliptical trainers, steppers, and all kinds of weight machines to work every muscle in your body, including muscles you didn’t know existed.  There are machines to work your abductors, adductors, hamstrings, gluts, biceps, triceps, deltoids, and traps.  Each machine has a set of levers to enable you to set the machine properly to your size, as well as a metal pin to select the amount of weight you are going to lift, press, curl, etc.  Some of these contraptions look like Rube Goldberg inventions and, if there wasn’t a display card illustrating how the machine works, you could spend a good couple of hours trying to figure it out.

How did working out get so complex?  Well, the answer is a familiar one – business.  Once American business saw that a large number of us were willing to fork out hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a year to try to turn ourselves into either a modern day Adonis or Aphrodite, they knew they could mine that ambition for profit.  So that’s what they did.  To the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. 

Gyms, personal trainers, work out gear, athletic shoes, nutritional supplements, enhanced drinks, power bars, heart monitors, and on and on.  It’s all part of today’s fitness solution.  

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Jack Lalanne died in January.  He was the godfather of the fitness boom with his own tv show in the early 1950s.  I didn’t pay much attention to Jack Lalanne growing up.  His audience seemed to be traditional housewives who were stuck at home.  He told them to get in shape all you needed was a towel and a chair.  

Don't tell that to the makers of the Ab Roller.