"Exercise Delusion"

by John Nguyen, FIT Exercise Director

Grab Bag: Exercise Delusion

I am embarrassed by the fitness catalogs sent to my home. One in particular is called Perform Better! The paper-thin, semi-glossy cover almost always depicts a couple of unknown, low-paid fitness models performing some kind of exercise with the equipment in the catalog. This makes advertising sense, but what doesn’t make sense is how much these models seem to enjoy the exercise, their smiles and laughs radiating as they step onto the aerobic step-boxes while holding a medicine ball at their hips with such relaxed posture that they might as well have been posing for a Tommy Hilfiger back-yard photo shoot. Their attempt at conveying exercise action fails so miserably that a rock could have done a better job, if for no other reason than the fact that a rock doesn’t look like it’s having fun.

And that is the problem I have with these catalogs: Everyone seems to be having fun. I do not remember the last time I smiled while in the middle of an exercise. Although the usual grimacing can be mistaken for an ugly smile, I assure you a smile is the last thing I can muster if I’m anywhere near serious about my fitness program. And I’m serious about my fitness program. I’m not kamikaze-post-office-take-down serious, but serious enough that performing an exercise doesn’t resemble watching a sitcom.

Many of my friends know that I’m a trainer, but they aren’t familiar with what I do from day to day. Recently a couple of them were in my home and flipping through a Perform Better! catalog that was sitting on the kitchen counter. One of them made a comment that she wanted to take up some personal training sessions with me. Referring to the models in the catalog, she said, “These people look like they’re having fun!”

Her comment was a direct insult on you, the clients of FIT, and it was a direct insult on the hundreds and thousands of other people who know what it takes to gain benefits from their exercises: Exertion, sweat, and good old fashion, ball-busting hard work. Having fun isn’t part of a serious exercise.

But don’t hold my friend liable for such dubious remark. Rather, blame the fitness catalogs with their happy-people persona. And don’t blame the fitness models in these fitness catalogs, who probably were either 1) just happy to be modeling or 2) stupidly stunned that they actually agreed to this ridiculous pageant. The tragedy of marketing’s triumph over engineering has gotten everyone smiling when they should be grimacing.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think training should be purely torturous labor; hard work does not necessarily exclude fun. But the “fun” should be an element of personalities within the gym environment, the energy in the air, the relationship between trainer and client, or the conversation shared during resting – but not from the exercise itself. Unless someone makes a crude joke about Britney Spears, I don’t smile or laugh during an exercise. Of course, smiling isn’t a sin, nor is laughing, and jokes about Britney Spears are always welcome, but none of these have a place during a heavy set of back squats, Deadlifts, push-presses, kipping pull-ups or any serious exercise worth doing.

An exercise militant, I am not. But if your time is limited and you have only two or three hours a week for exercising, then those hours aren’t for smelling roses, or smelling like roses. During those hours, you do battle.

Doing battle in the gym means exercising with ferocity, because there are enemies at the gate. And the enemies are otherwise known as: food industry, modern lifestyle, cultural habits, holiday gluttony, sedentary working conditions, overweight, obesity and a host of other conditions and situations that conspire a coup d’ etat against our health and fitness. It is fight or die.

So, unless you work out everyday and therefore you can afford to “take it easy” on some of those days, you should strive to exercise with fierceness or – in terms used within the exercise field – with high intensity. Which most of you do, and I’m proud of that fact. But I’m also afraid that you might one day flip through a fitness catalog and get the idea that exercising is supposed to be “fun” and then start to ask why you aren’t smiling or laughing with the exercises I prescribe to you. Well, if that is ever the case, then I have a lot of offensive Britney Spears jokes to tell you in between your sets, but not during your exercises.