FitnessFixation.com

Yeah yeah, I haven’t written anything in a while. The longest stretch ever, actually. See, I quit fitness and moved to the mountains and found my higher self, and her name is Rawunda-Spirit-Wolfchild and she doesn’t need to do athletic things, because she is too evolved to bother with her corporeal self.

Or I’ve just been busy and kind of overwhelmed for reasons far too boring to detail here, and writing for me is like exercise—once you get out of the habit, it is a bitch to get back into it. Hey, I have been working out though! As if anyone cares but me. I kind of wonder if I killed this blog for good with my being gone. Let’s find out. Oh, and I even wrote this post a while ago but never published it because I didn’t like it that particularly, but now I’m too out of practice to care so much, and I figure everyone has gone home anyway, so what the hell.

Did you know there’s not much new in fitness? Ever? There’s some fundamental movements and a lot of variations on those and some great equipment and some kickass sports and forms of dance. There’s even some movements people historically had to do as part of manual labor but now that we are largely desk-bound, we actually simulate these movements for fitness, not survival. That’s about it. I mean, occasionally there’s some new piece of equipment or novel idea, but mostly NOT. It’s all been done before.

I don’t think this is a bad thing—if a movement is so totally unnatural that it hasn’t been done before, it’s probably not going to be that helpful to you in your goals and your life. And if you are like me, and you get bored easily, you are happy to learn some new variation on a theme just for novelty’s sake. There’s not much new, but there is lots of stuff to do out there is the big wide world.

The quest to be THE new thing that spreads to the fitness-hungry masses spawns some really silly marketing. This is how a hundred pieces of dumbass equipment are sold on informercials, and how celebrities and celebrity trainers can market their workouts like they’ve found the one true way, when half the time they just make you do a shitload of lunges. I saw a video in the store—someone’s kettlebell workout for women—and I swear the bell was so small (and non-threatening I guess) it looked like a paperweight.

You know how to sell something to women? Call it “cardio”, because I guess some marketing person would tell me women see cardio and they think “oh, cardio equals calorie burn, that’s good because I want to lose weight”. I do believe real live boxing and salsa dancing have cardio benefits, for example, but of course that’s gotta be spelled out to make it seem more like productive exercise and less like, you know, some scary new hobby. Cardio dancing, cardio kickboxing, cardio yoga, cardio sculpting, cardio water aerobics, cardio shmardio. Sometimes your instructor can dance, or kickbox, and I’m not really knocking it, I’m more annoyed that it has to be soft-sold for people to try it, even though I soft-sell myself and I understand being scared to walk into a class and assume you will get hit or be expected to pirouette when you never have before. Lots of cardio whatever classes are great, it’s not that any of it is inherently bad or that people are bad for using the word. But sometimes the point here is to fill the room with people who want CARDIO something, and slapping that word in front makes it seem more palatable and less like what it actually is, because it may in fact be actual boxing or salsa dance or it may bear very little resemblance to a fighting style or sport in how it’s practiced in a room with a wooden floor. Of course, and we are all a little bored with this I think, if you want women to pick up weights, say sculpt or tone, because heaven forbid we actually strength train and get gigantic muscles, which we all know just pop out the moment you pick up a weight heavier than five pounds. Someday someone will be teaching us Cardio Sculpting Tennis, and we’ll swing a lightly weighted racquet around a gym room but not ever hit an actual ball, it’ll just be strange approximations of forehands and backhands, because we don’t want to learn sports, we want CARDIO to be skinny and TONING to have nice arms. Now watch me offer a cardio something class next because, hey, we gotta call it something.

Don’t want to say CARDIO because it’s soooo 90’s? Say “Power”, because power is good, even if it does corrupt, and absolute Power Yoga Water Pilates Fitness Dancing corrupts absolutely.

Then there’s the unholy alliance of two things, smushed together, or something dumb with some new piece of equipment you toss around. I swear, I just saw that one gym is doing Piloxing. Do you know what that is? A combination of Pilates and Boxing. Yup. Do we think boxers lack core strength, or is it that women will go to Pilates because it’s all lady core strength-y, so now you make them do it while wearing gloves?

So much of this shit is marketing and putting your name on something and making a workout video and pimping it to a target audience like post-partum moms or people who want tantric yoga you can do at your desk. I’m not surprised people don’t know what is good and what is sucky. Hey, I teach bootcamp classes. Have I ever even been in the army? Only the army of one bitch. But if we call it bootcamp, then people know there will probably be push-ups and running, as opposed to step aerobics or water dancing or simply relaxing with a latte. We could call it something else, honestly, and maybe someday we will, and I will trademark the FUCK out of it and you can write to me in my house made of gold bricks and have my personal servants type you out a reply and hand-deliver it to you because I’ll be too rich to even bother with the internets.

If you are going to take movements from a dance style or sport, why not expect to build some actual skills, rather than just burn calories? How come it all has to be cardio fuckity-fuck to get us to try it? And I just don’t get why we laydeeees can’t actually weight train either, we can only tone, but if I talk about that one more time my head will fall off my neck and roll under the desk and I’ll spend the next hour feeling around on the floor for it.

I’ll tell you why: Everyone is looking for the magic skinni-fying, perfect body, fitness bullet.

Maybe I’ll just start teaching Cardio Speedskating Aerobics where we slide around in our socks along the floor. Or maybe I’m going to make a workout where you have to wear a special weighted bracelets, and I’m going to call it the Wonder Woman workout, and there’s lots of sprinting after bad guys in a unitard and I swear to god we will all live out our secret Lynda Carter fantasies. Sure, it’s gimmicky, and might be lame, but by god, I will do my darndest to make millions, at least until someone replaces me with the Yoga Baby Healing workout, where you crawl around on the floor for an entire hour and simulate infant movements as poses so you can align yourself properly, because hell, have you ever seen a baby with a bad back…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:46 pm and is filed under blah blah, bloodsports, body building, celebrity, exercise, fads and facts, healthy crap, new moves, sports, weight, yoga and stretch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.