General fitness is perceived in today’s lifestyle as Bodybuilding. Gyms are most sought after with their methods proving effective for ages.
People of Chennai have got this wrong perception that gymnasiums have the singular purpose of helping them lose fat. In reality lot of gymnasiums employ instructors with no real qualification in fitness. They ask students to enroll with half-yearly or annual packages for an extrava
gant amount of money. They will have fantasy items that are bright in color to attract new clientele, the instructor will look like an amateur bodybuilder. The new students dream to carve a similar physique for themselves and join with the best package available. The new students enquire about how to develop a similar physique to the instructor. The instructors give some generic tips, ideas, and a common diet chart for everyone. You will follow that workout and you will start competing with existing gym rats who aimless work out with weights. Initially, the instructors help you, but later they pitch you to go ahead and enroll for personal training to look like them. Personal training will be added as a separate cost.
The next thing you know, students who have enrolled for PT are dreaming about six-pack abs and start doing ab workouts, namely crunches of all kinds. Regardless of whether you are a male or female, the instructors push you to do the crunches and dread mill (read: treadmill) for 20 minutes. Then, comes the array of supplements that they promote. These magic powders and magic pills which are supposedly clinical gold will NOT help you. The instructors and/or the gym stands to gain 15 to 20% of the supplement sold, this is the reason they push you to purchase these products, not to ensure results. There is no single supplement that will magically bring about fat loss. When a gym promises some magic supplement, RUN! Just RUN! The importance of following a healthy diet plan can not be ignored in lieu of dietary supplements.
What we should learn from this is that gymnasiums don’t want you to progress as much as they want to ‘stay in business.
Example: If 2 people enroll in a given day, that leaves the gym with 60 students per month and 720 students per year. Even though there is no place to accommodate these students they bravely do it, because, they bank on you. Your naiveté, your habit of being less consistent and they count on your absence. They stand to gain profit, only when you enroll for the big packages and don’t come to their establishment for exercise. Ask around with your friends, if 3 to 4 people joined at a time, I can bet that not all 4 of them attended continually for a year.
So you are saying gymnasiums are business establishments? Damn, right! They are not temples or holy places where you get to ‘magically’ burn fat or lose weight! They handle a unique type of clientele, people who dream about the best bodies a man/woman can possibly have. They sell the dream to unassuming people and it is a BIG question mark as to whether they will ensure results for you.
What people don’t realize is competitive bodybuilding as a sport is different from functional strength training. If you are not becoming strong after 12 weeks of working out at the gym, what’s the use of looking stronger than you actually are? A person should rather opt to be stronger than they look in the mirror!
If you can lift or carry a load of 1.5x to 2x your body weight in kg, then you can consider yourself very strong. When you look like a human balloon, but can’t do 20 pull-ups continually, what’s the purpose of going to a gym? Ask yourself!
