fitness Politics

Loving Lululemon

Posted by scalesonfire on April 23, 2012
Posted in: fitness Politics, Product Review/Endorsement. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

This is Conservative Fitness

For me, experiences inside the yoga world are conducive to the stigmas the outside world has about yoga.  Places aren’t straight-male friendly, with tiny male changing rooms and tons of incredibly forward gay men.  Yogis do have different personalities, displaying some things I share and some things I simply don’t.  Plus, yoga is difficult and it is discouraging to see women half your size show more control over body weight and respiratory stamina than you can.  But I’m an athlete.  I practice yoga for many reasons, but mostly because I’m interested in heightening the overall performance of my body and mind together.  I believe strongly that such aims are the cornerstones of fitness, so I make my yoga practice, as well as the calisthenics I practice, the running I practice and the sports I practice about mastery of skill, endurance, and triggered performance.

One thing I do love about the yoga world is Lululemon.

From the perspective of the average American, Lululemon is filled with nauseatingly-cheery salespeople (cutely called ‘educators’), incredibly overpriced but deliciously comfortable clothing, and like everything else in the yoga world, accommodates women and boxes in men-In the stores, on the website, naturally, without thinking of it.  Why?  The company still attracts an overwhelmingly female consumer, and companies go where the money will be spent in their field.

To me, Lululemon is a corporate embodiment of Conservative Fitness.

Last fall, Lululemon gave itself a chance to get conservative, and the world was outraged to find out that Lululemon’s goal-coaching, and inspirational quoting and educating was a quest to deliver the world from mediocrity to greatness.  People threatened to boycott.  Liberal hatred for Ayn Rand surfaced from every angle.  You know what I did?  I bought some more Lululemon.  I joined their Research and Development program.  I went to stores and had conversations with educators.  What I found out was that this was my first encounter with organized conservative fitness.

One small example of the world misunderstanding Lululemon.

Those pushy educators, they’re doing two things:

First, they’re telling you what the product does, because any liberal-minded, superficial idiot can understand that a pair of pants will make your butt look better, but it takes a human being with real integrity to buy something because it is an effective tool for your task.

Second, they’re conversing with you to find out if you’re one of them.  Basically, everyone in that store wants to know why you’ve walked in to see their product because if you’re like them, you can make this product an effective tool in your life.

In an Ayn Rand sort of way, they fully expect the John Galt of fitness to walk through those glass doors, round up the most selfish conservatives in fitness, and stop the fitness world.

And there isn’t one problem with that to me.

I though, am in the minority.  Many think that a brand that is yoga-inspired should be a compassionate, liberal, accepting one.  These people forget that before compassion, before release, before the liberal aspects of yoga are explored, the practice must happen conservatively.  My in-class intention for a long time has simply been “control,” because I believe that yoga is about control over body and mind.  To me, taking that control every time is what separates me from the individual trying to get into shape for all of the wrong reasons.  At Lululemon, the focus seems to be control, turning weaknesses into strengths, and preparing yourself for success.  The problem is that the average individual has no idea that fitness even can be about these things, much less that they should.

My idea is to expand Lululemon’s vision to become the first yoga-inspired organization to embrace and highlight the goal-oriented, fit, healthy American male and much as they do females with the same attributes.  The idea is not to compete with the expansive Nike empire, but to give men a product and voice that helps those men with conservative fitness philosophies who would usually wear a Nike, Reebok, Adidas or Under Armour product made for a professional athlete, treat their Lulu with the same love and trust.  It may mean more generous cuts in the shirts, and pants more suited for high-speed movements, or it may even more simply mean highlighting elite-looking, hot-bodied, success obsessed male ambassadors like the female ones to push their product.  If you think I’m wrong, go take a look at the marketing of coconut water in the last year.

I wear and endorse Lululemon because more than any other athletic wear brand, they understand that their product, their philosophy, their personality, isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t so bad if that discourages those who don’t want to get it.  Now its time to find some men who get it, some fitness conservatives who buy products because they improve tasks, who practice yoga because it will help them to build a position of control in their lives and in the world, and who compete at life because you play to win the game.

 

The One Percent of Fitness

Posted by scalesonfire on April 23, 2012
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

In fitness, its about being in the 1%

In fitness, being a part of the 99% means, you’re unhappy with your body in some way, you either exercise or your don’t but you only associate exercise with changing your appearance, and you’d rather buy something to fix the problem momentarily than explore the practices that fix the problem permanently.  That’s all liberal fitness, and sounds awful to those who do it right.

ScalesonFire.com is not all negative, and I’m not the most harsh trainer out there, but this is conservative fitness.  I don’t apologize for pushing buttons.  Why?  Because Bill O’Reilly and Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh don’t do it.  Most issues that inspire passion in the public like politics, religion, choice of cellular phone provider, and even fitness have its conservative and liberal sides.  Generally, the elite, successful, one percent conservatives both control and are the envy of the ninety-nine percent liberals.  This is common, understood, and the backbone of every liberal/conservative argument around us.

In America, we teach our children to come down on the elites before trying to be elite ourselves.

In fitness though, since there is no participation in the argument from the conservative side, liberalism is simply the way.  I am simply here to preach conservative fitness to combat liberal fitness as Fox News preaches conservative politics to combat networks they feel preach liberal politics.  In America, we need a balance.  By coddling the overweight and out-of-shape, by allowing quick-fix and celebrity-obsessed ideals to run rampant through our media, by going out of our way to simply accommodate the consumers who consume more, we have all contributed to the notion that obesity and fitness mediocrity are an accepted element of today’s society.

We need voices that will help everyone understand that first, complete fitness inadequacies are unacceptable in any normally constructed human being.  This is because effective fitness methods are incredibly simple.  Liberal individuals make fitness complicated by first, making the process about superficiality, then by refusing to participate unless the activity is fun to them and easy enough to complete, then they quit and try the new thing.  Over a lifetime, liberal fitness can become extremely expensive and create all of the lasting negative emotions about fitness that we see in hopelessly overweight individuals.  If we have given so many the choice to be overweight or obese, but tell them to buy a particular product or to buy into a diet or method, then we should hear from those who think we should be independent of diets and methods and make the choice every day to be healthy.

In fitness, for those who are liberal with their bodies, everything productive feels unjust.

Conservative fitness represents the deepest fear of those ninety-nine percenters who could never imagine real exercise and in result, have no concepts of the benefits of real exercise.

“Real exercise” is first, practice-based, meaning that it is done with a frequency, consistency, and encourages improvement.

Second, real exercise does not end.  Acting as though there is a finish line to the fitness process is acknowledging the fact that a person began the process to achieve a set, superficial result instead of looking to simply live as a fit person indefinitely.

Last, real exercise is independent.  It is independent of diets, gyms, workout plans, friends, doubters, anything.  It is independent of all the things in a person’s head, and independent of all of the ideas being placed into heads.

Real exercise is exercise that has not been repackaged to fit the desires of people who don’t have the will to do the boring, tedious things it takes to be truly fit.  All other exercise methods, diets, gyms, trainers, they all require full dependence for lasting results, or are designed to take an individual’s money before the goal is met.

The goal of personal trainers, athletes, yogis, and all other practice-oriented fitness enthusiasts should be to understand and accept that they are the one-percent of society, because those who are active but are so because of superficial reasons are also a part of the fitness problem.  These individuals should lead their practices and businesses with this understanding in mind.  Those who exercise to understand deeper levels of focus, discipline, accomplishment and strength are the ones who obtain what one might call permanent results from exercise, they’re also the individuals in our society with the most desired after bodies and who soak up crowded rooms with their sexual energy.

Taking control of your body is about fighting liberal urges.  When it comes to fitness, no outside power can help you more than you can help yourself.  I tell it to bewildered clients all the time: My goal is to cure obesity, so that in fifteen years I’m out of a job.  The liberal needs the help and begs for the help and is dying for the help, but when the help comes, they aren’t as passionate about doing the work.  They’d rather pay to have the work done for them.   If not, they’d rather do something to keep up appearances.

Conservative fitness is about constant exercise, so that appearances don’t need to be kept up.  Let the liberals worry about appearance.

Fat people and fitness liberals are already trying.

Fixing the Fitness Problem-Choosing exercise over workouts

Posted by scalesonfire on November 11, 2011
Posted in: fitness Politics, Motivational, Practice, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

There are a lot of reasons that fitness is a broken industry and personal training is a broken profession, but none are bigger than the problems people have with understanding the difference between exercise and workouts.  Since the fitness industry is geared toward workouts, the average person sees the workout as being all of possible exercise and sees fitness as a direct result of workouts.  This approach may be fun, time-consuming (in a positive way), and at times, effective, but it is the absolute wrong way to go about becoming fit.

This mentality is all over the fitness world, but ask an elite athlete what’s more important to their success, drills and workouts or practice that’s specific to their sport, they’ll say the practice.  How could they ever get the most out of drills and workouts had they not honed their skills from a young age with repetition?  Workouts are simply to stress, test, and make already developed skills dynamic, they do not create skill.  This is just as the person attempting to lose weight MUST understand that workouts are for people who are in shape, exercise is for people trying to get into better shape.  Understanding this means gaining the ability to control the fitness process at will, instead of waiting for that set of DVDs or that class to control and stabilize the fitness process for you.

But we’ve overlooked an even bigger problem here: Exercising simply to look better is no valid or noble quest.

That’s right, one of my fundamental beliefs is that the actual premise of working out to lose weight is what prevents people from losing it.  There are many helpful analogies, but that’s like people who work at their jobs simply to make money.  When money is the motivating factor in work, then it’s difficult to be directly fulfilled by the work itself.  Fitness, when approached correctly, is fulfilling within itself, and at a higher magnitude than the fulfillment from the results themselves.

What fuels the clamor for workouts is the notion that working out in more extreme ways will speed up the superficial processes, and even deeper, it fuels entitlement.  It allows a person to desire a balance of hard work and rest, believing that they deserve the rest if they’ve worked hard.  A fit person, or someone who has the correct approach, always moves forward eith daily exercise because when a person exercises, all their body “deserves” is more exercise.

Now, this doesn’t mean that a person shouldn’t take days off.  I agree fully with what the fitness industry says about workouts and rest days, I just think that people are sold the whole “workouts and rest days” speil because it promotes laziness.  But hard workouts are hard on the body and mind, and have their place.  Daily practice like say, working to improve and increase your push-ups every day is a very different thing.  You should NOT take days off from a daily calisthenic routine or a deep yoga practice or a regular running practice.  It should feel like the death of all deaths to miss these things, and that concept is much deeper than superficiality, you’ve chosen to give your body these things daily, and with them, form what your body is.

If you’re using the methods we’re used to, and going through the process of eat-drink-work-fun-relax-exercise, then you’re probably wondering why the aesthetic results aren’t coming consistently.  This is because fitness and seeking it is far more important than all these things.  They are all necessary, as many things are, which is why they should be locked into our lives, done as a sort of second-nature, and never be made into a big deal.  Eating is necessary, and a small deal, fitness is important and should be a big deal until it can be small.  If fitness in our society is sold as a small deal, that doesn’t happen daily, then the goal of the conservative personal trainer is to prove that the opposite yields ideal results.  What has sold to this point has simply not worked.

In this series I’ll be discussing exercise as a practice, something you can build on every day and complement with workouts.  The goal of practice is perfection and comfort with that perfection.  Long before the perfection though, the body adapts aesthetically to meet the daily demands of your practice, and your body will continue this adaptation as long as you practice, so looks won’t be a worry.

The End of Entitlement

Posted by scalesonfire on September 23, 2011
Posted in: explanations, fitness Politics, Motivational, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

The problem is that she already thinks it's her right to have ice cream.

The answer was always right there.  What causes overweight bodies and comfort with obesity?  What causes a person to be satisfied with poor food and exercise choices?  What created the negative stigma placed on fitness?  What’s the number one thing that trainers need to push out of a person’s head before they push in all the positivity and understanding?

Entitlement.

Our problem as a society is not simply that we increase the population and therefore increase the umbrella our society forms for that population, it’s that the population is unable to value their lives without the society.  As long as our society provides things, individuals will think that they deserve them.  Just because there is a bus for you to ride, does not mean that you deserve a seat.  Our parents create us and within months try to directly acclimate us to both healthy and unhealthy things in our society, not because they feel that any are particularly necessary to life, but because the American mentality is to condition children early on the idea that they deserve enjoyment.  So everything must provide enjoyment for children-food, television, school.  Everything a child in our society does must be rooted in enjoyment for them to give their full attention.

If the child thinks they are entitled to enjoyment, then the adult, who now abuses the adult privilege of living out entitlements, lives devoid of sensible, prudent, and prosperous practices.  We have always been entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but these terms are created to broadly protect us from tyranny.  They were not given to us to justify what I call immediate freedoms.  We went from being free to pursue happiness long-term without government interference to thinking that this pursuit is a pursuit of over-indulgence.  The ways we feel about the things that drive our emotions, like acceptance, food, family, personal loyalties, and love, do that driving because they are grossly misused by people who think that these things are a right and should not be intruded upon.  But no one deserves these things.  No one simply deserves thousands of Facebook friends, or huge meals, or a loving family, or for their sports team to win, or to find their soul mate.  Still, because so many feel entitled to largely irrelevant things, this is all that concerns us.

There is no notion that important things, like valuing the body, or instilling positive virtue in younger generations are priorities in our society.  We want to have fun, feel good, and never work for anything.  Most treat exercise like something they’d never do if they already looked great.  The problem is that individuals who don’t like lives of entitlement always get more from exercise than the rest because entitlement doesn’t negatively fuel such a positive element of their lives.  Typically, a person says, “I enjoy food, I enjoy laziness, I enjoy enjoyment, and I deserve them all.”  Their deserving overrides focus, dedication, and commitment.  What’s worse is that they never understand that willpower is not simply committing to exercise, but also de-committing to practices that have always hindered the results of exercise.  When a person thinks that these practices are their right, it’s difficult to explain to them that their fitness process will always stall.

We deserve nothing more than the bodies we were given, and building or destroying those bodies is an individual’s prerogative.  What doctors and so-called experts won’t admit to those less enlightened is that most of the things we do with and to our bodies are products of the entitlement mentality and in result, harm our bodies from the day our parent sticks the lollipop in our mouth when we’re crying and we associate soothing with sweet.  Entitlement, whenever and wherever it’s cultivated in the human mind, begins the direct progression to death.  Nothing has created more negative habits than individuals thinking that building negative habits is their right.  Our founding fathers never prepared for a population too ignorant to clearly understand and interpret founding documents so much so that freedom for many generations has been freedom to be fat and do nothing.  Seeing the fitness industry conservatively, I now know why I loathe entitlement so much.  In the most needy areas of our society, positive habits, developed minds, and fit bodies are not the products of mindless resolutions, limited erudition and repetitive jobs, and quick-fix, no work, infomercial exercise or concealing garments.  Positive habits are developed within individuals who are intelligent enough to focus on the important in life.  But, because of entitlement, there are no individuals.  That’s because the thing people most feel they’re entitled to is normality.   If you’ve ever just stopped to take a look at “normal” people, you’d realize that the right to be and think like everyone else is a right that has no value.

Obesity is a Choice

Posted by scalesonfire on August 22, 2011
Posted in: explanations, fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

If you’re here, reading this, then you’ve made the choice to come to Scales on Fire.  You made that choice either because you saw the above sticker somewhere, or you found out about this in some other way.  Choices though, come big and small, but life’s great choices are made over a lifetime.  Our society has become paralyzed in thinking that these grand choices aren’t choices at all.  That in some way, they ways we choose to live our lives and treat our bodies is chosen for us.  We force children to accept negatives early in life.  The parent makes the choice to say to a child early: “face it, I’m fat, so is your father, so are you.  It’s in our genes.”  They tell them this too soothe the stinging reality that things that have always made them feel good are generally unhealthy and that life can be one long, extended battle with understanding and combating this.  They fail to realize that the pleasure of food and a sedentary lifestyle is the problem itself.  We associate things that taste good and make us feel good with good times, and hence, do them repeatedly, far more than the human body can handle.  Those good times resonate with us.  The people who loved us most gave us sweets.  The most fun family gatherings were loaded with foods that cause cancer and heart disease.  Don’t forget our mothers associating food with love.  We overeat because we’ve been raised to think we need to, that overeating is living.  Overeating and over-exercising might be living, but just overeating isn’t.  We also aren’t active because we care more about the ways our bodies appear superficially and how we look in and with all of our ever-so-important possessions than the ways our bodies actually work.

It’s the same way many women make the choice to be extremely overweight, but get their hair and nails done regularly.  A person like that really doesn’t understand that inner beauty has no price and fully facilitates outer beauty.  So she could probably be a fit person, have bitten off fingernails, be wearing a baseball cap and no makeup and look amazing, or she could be herself, blame her body on bad genes and still just be a fat person with nice hair and nails.  It doesn’t make her healthy, but unfortunately, this choice makes her happy enough.  Women like this and many other people in our society are making an indirect choice to stay overweight.  Society has provided them with enough mental and physical comforts.  There is no incentive to exercise at all, much less as much as a human being should.  All of the things our society considers to be fun are done sitting still.  There’s an incredible acceptance of flaws that totally contradicts our blatant superficiality.  We are a backward, unhealthy, and irrational society that on a whole, chooses to be fat and claims we have no choice.

We should begin to understand that obesity is no terrible hereditary disease.  It’s a choice made by individuals and families who simply take in millions and millions more times the calories than they burn exercising.  Couple that with the time they spend sitting and “enjoying” things they think they deserve as humans and you’ve got more than an overweight person (because a number on the scale tells maybe one percent of our story), you’ve got a body that doesn’t work, or respond to the brain well.  Later you’ve got early Alzheimer’s, you’ve got scary-sounding cancers, you’ve got a body that began the process of dying in your twenties and you didn’t know it.  Personally, I’ve made the choice to live and become more alive through exercise.  Even further, I approach this exercise conservatively, shying away from liberal exercise practices that only keep people overweight and doubting their own abilities forever.  If you agree, I’d like to hear from you.  You you don’t agree, you’re probably struggling with your weight, and you desperately need my services.

-Mike

Fat Chance

Posted by scalesonfire on May 10, 2011
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Chris Christie, Leader of the Fat World

If I don’t believe that fitness is about superficiality, then I shouldn’t always cite superficial reasons to make important decisions right?  In our country, ability and qualifications should outshine looks, but they rarely do.  In a culture where most contests are really tests of beauty, popularity or both, I’ve always shied away from making decisions about others based on first impressions, pre-conceived bias, or simply aesthetic discrimination.  There is though, one area where bias is prevalent in my heart: I won’t be led by a fat person.  I like my coaches, bosses, and politicians to be in full control of their bodies.  I don’t believe that an individual who has lost control of their own body is fit to lead others in any capacity, and it’s why I can barely even hear the name of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie without imagining scores of overweight Americans flocking to the polls to vote for “their guy.”

Mr. Christie has been the Governor of New Jersey for nearly two years, and in that time, he’s set out to clean up many of the political messes in the state.  He’s also gained a great deal of recognition around the country as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, a quest he vehemently denies.  Now that Barack Obama has puffed his chest in boasting over his overseeing the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, Republicans, already viewing the incumbent President as “unbeatable” have clamored for Mr. Christie to run in 2012.  Unfortunately for Mr. Christie, no matter what his policies are, he will never get my vote.  Mr. Christie is a fat man.  He is a combination between William Howard Taft and Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid.  He is so fat, that he’s too fat to be trusted.  He’s so fat, that he could only lead people into a situation where they are fatter.  He is so fat, that he’ll be an awful example to children on how to live their lives.  He will not be a man who is a champion of self-discipline.  Even Mr. Obama, a cigarette smoker needed to go to great lengths to downplay his smoking and highlight his basketball playing.  The First Lady, Michelle Obama needed an entire health and fitness campaign to simply show this administrations dedication to the issue.  In the world’s fattest, laziest, most undisciplined country, it was necessary in 2008 that voters saw a candidate who had an air of self-control.  If even one individual chooses to vote for Mr. Christie, it will display our most dirty American secret, that we are undisciplined because we are endeared by the undisciplined.

Chris Christie, in all his splendor

We love Charles Barkley, his huge gut, his bad golf swing, and his huge mouth.  We love other flawed celebrities for many other reasons.  Voters love Mr. Christie for many of the same reasons.  Americans on a whole have this backward notion that the more regular a prominent individual is, and hence the more like the common man they are, the more accepted they should be.  The phrase “down-to-earth” is to me, indicative of an individual who desperately needs to connect with people who won’t ever be in their position.  How does a person in a prominent position though, simply flip a switch to be accepted in higher circles?  They don’t.  In our society the ignorant, the overweight, the unattractive are always searching for traces of their personalities in our leaders, and it allows for politicians like Mr. Christie to appeal to the common man who is afraid to ever change and be better.  Mr. Christie is so fat that he is literally down-to-earth.  If he runs and is elected, he will directly embody the current American spirit: Here, we care about the issues, not ourselves.  God forbid that someone might suggest that care for ourselves would permanently fix a few of the issues, that person might be ousted from the public eye.

If John F. Kennedy were elected today, and preached from the podium to “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country” to our lazy and undisciplined masses, he’d probably be shunned by his own party and lamented by the libertarian Tea Party Movement.  Its just the culture we’ve come to know.  We want to get fatter, dumber and protect issues we don’t really understand.  Even more a part of our culture is the idea that an individual who thinks like us and shares our weaknesses is fit to lead us.  Well, if voters will not vote for those who commit adultery or steal from the government even though many Americans do, then I will not be led by a fat person.  I believe that an overweight body, one like Mr. Christie’s is proof of poor sensory decisions with food and exercise within his own mind, and I’d be quite afraid of other poor sensory decisions he’d make if he’s been so personally reckless.

Liberal Losers

Posted by scalesonfire on January 20, 2011
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

 

Soon we will need programs and instructional videos for other basic things we can't control.

Muscle confusion.  When my muscles get confused I get them a tutor, its called dedication.  I learned it when I was fourteen doing push-ups in my bedroom.  I learned what doing more of them did, and I learned what doing them every day did.  Seeing your body change because of exercise is one of the coolest things out there, and even today, my body looks different when I’m doing yoga every day, and it looks a specific way when I’m running every day.  See a pattern?  Every day exercise causes a certain effect-change.  Your body and muscles change.  Lifting weights on a rigid daily schedule will help your muscles grow, helping you get huge.  Push-ups and pull-ups and sit-ups every day will help you get you get solid.  Yoga every day will help you get lean.  All of them every day?  Well that sounds like a great workout plan-a perfect one.  It sounds like P90X, and it also sounds like Power 90.  It’s a simple and stupid concept, almost as stupid as the people buying it.

I can say that without equivocation.  Stupid people.  People dumb enough to already know and see how exercise works, let their bodies get out of control, finally gain the nerve to take serious action, and follow a program that breaks down how exercise works.  Its like walking into your bathroom and watching a video about brushing your teeth because you’ve taken three years off from brushing your teeth because other things were more important.  Exercise is basic, and free.  Attempting exercise every day for ninety days will get you into the best shape of your life.  I mean every day.

That’s the P90X guarantee.  Do it for ninety days, see results, or your money back.  What if your life was on the line, would you be able to exercise every day for ninety days to save your life in some sort of “fit to the death” contest?  I don’t think so, but for Americans, paying money delivers that type of motivation.  More than threats, depression, terrible things the doctor might say and clothes we can’t fit, monetary commitments force us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t for any other reason.  What, with all the cupcakes, couches, jeans with elastic waistbands and people who will accept us for the fat sloths we are, why do it for any other reason other than a return on investment?  Investing our money is the only thing that will get us to even try to fix the ways our bodies look.

It seems to be our mentality: “I’ve paid the money, so now it works for me.”  We do it to our children with tutoring and lessons, we do it with household appliances, and we do it with our bodies.  The only problem is that we can get conned into making any investment if the need has battered us emotionally.  So after we’re depressed about our kids failing in school or a belly that hides our feet in the shower, our first impulse isn’t to take personal action, its to pay a professional who laughs all the way to the bank.  I’ve got no problems with this because sometimes the professionals know more than us.  Buying the solution from an info-mercial though, is a backwards way to approach this process.

Obviously, the Beachbody company has tightened the reins on this info-mercial industry.  Their products take real exercise and gear it toward the parts of the American psyche that dreams all day about looking good.  They make the exercise so simple that nothing ever has to be done correctly, making people much more comfortable than they would be with say, a personal trainer who would encourage them to bring integrity to the exercises so they see lasting results.  If you’ve ever seen one of their info-mercials, they look silly and cheesy.  You know what looks sillier?  Seeing the people actually do the programs.  Seeing them writhing through movements incorrectly and holding postures half-way would make a fitness conservative cringe.

Beachbody's aim: "People are going to shell out millions to try to look like these models in booty shorts and shirtless personal trainers." But no, they're not just selling superficiality to America, right?

This is if you even try it, because most people don’t get past the first week.  Exercising every day, trying to “confuse” your muscles, is difficult when you just haven’t, ever.  As a person who has set out on their own to get some form of exercise every day for years now, It’s easy for me, but for a person who has paid the money, cleared the space, and is ready to start, how do they build the motivation to do it every day?  Oh, right, they remember that this cost them money.  What they refuse to understand is that this is an insanely liberal practice.  Only the true liberals in our society can understand the backward notion that a monetary investment can fix problems that we need to tend to personally.  No system, method, or philosophy can build the personal determination to really fix these sorts of problems.  By handling the important things in our lives like conservatives, we can build the focus and control to fix these problems ourselves.

Think I’m wrong?  I’m only telling you what runners, yogis, and athletes are doing.  People who understand how fitness works and seek it out properly think that it’s simply crazy to do things to replace exercise, or challenge yourself to be disciplined for ninety days, or to do anything just to see results.  People like us know results, we’re not waiting to see them.  People like us eat right because it helps us exercise better, fitness liberals eat right because they’ve “heard this is healthy.”  I’m a fitness conservative, which has nothing to do with my political views, the politics of ME are far more important to me.  If you’re a fitness liberal, remember that P90X won’t directly overhaul your personal system of indulgence, envy, and scrambling to get skinny.  It’s a negative cause, trying to look good.  Even worse when you’re trying to pay for it.  If you know how exercise works, turn off your television, leave your home, and go seek it out.

Making a Case for Yoga

Posted by scalesonfire on January 19, 2011
Posted in: explanations, fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

If we can eat pizza and sushi at a ballgame.  If we can serve “French” fries with every one of our traditional meals.  If we can celebrate English Puritans’ new life in a new world by eating like maniacs.  If we can celebrate the birth of a Jewish carpenter we believe to be the son of God by showering each other with gifts.  If we can celebrate that same carpenter’s death and resurrection by believing in an imaginary rabbit that hides colored eggs.  If we can, be American, we can do yoga as a country.

It’s painfully true that most “American” customs have little roots here.  My problem is that it doesn’t matter where our customs came from, whether one is discussing Christmas trees or Valentine’s candy, we only keep and practice the ones that have to do with indulgence.  One nemesis of mine, caffeine, a highly addictive and controlling drug that currently has our country by the short hairs, is mostly consumed because it helps people do things they’d rather not do on little or no sleep and energy.  So many people are dependent on it that these days, coffee brands have oil money, and energy drinks sell the way soda used to.  We can harm our selves without regard, and that ability is what sets us apart from other countries.

God, send me another sign. That 'Cupid' thing you were telling me about went way over my head.

We’re also macho, which leads me to a custom that is all ours-gym vanity.  Yeah, it seems that throughout history, people have strength-trained, used their body weight to be stronger and fitter, done all types of stretching and balance movements, but gyms as we know them are a new element in our lineage.  They’re places that are much less about helping people lose weight than they are about making gym owners money and feeding this need for communal superficiality that so many Americans have.  Basically, they’re expensive indoor beaches with mats and weights instead of sand and water.  The gym is what’s created the backwards connection people have between weights and fitness.  The gym is the reason personal training in our country doesn’t work.  The gym is the reason that the fitness industry is one thousand parts vanity and one part health.   And we love gyms, because we think that helping yourself look good is loving yourself.

Helping yourself be better is loving yourself.  Yoga helps you be better.  The three most beautiful things I’ve experienced in my life are newspapers, the World Series, and yoga.  Still, yoga is the only one I can share.   Yoga is the only thing I’ve ever done that I’ve seen it heal things internally.  I had scoliosis before I started practicing yoga, and I was an inch shorter and sixty pounds heavier.  My bench press and squat numbers were better then.  Now I can carry groceries longer, or hold a heavy child all day, or do laundry without a car.  I’m ‘country strong’ now, it’s all useful.  God forbid someone ever wants to fight me, I’ve got the determination and strength to kill anything that comes at me.  I’ll be focused on it too.  I haven’t been one for any sort of intoxication since I started practicing yoga, so in any contest, chess, tennis, scrabble, I’m sharp.  And cool.  Yoga’s melted away my temper, so today, I’ll walk away from that fight, and I’ll never be the one to start one.  I react less, and I’m proactive more, and all the while, my body just asks me for more yoga.

Maybe a new platform (or mat) will help Barack defeat the GOP in 2012

Not simply because I do it, or because its effective, or because it can make positive mental shifts for you, do I think that all of America should step onto a yoga mat.  I really think it should be our principle form of exercise for three reasons:

First, anyone can do it.  There is yoga for the young, old, sick, and healthy.  There is yoga that helps you get better at sex and yoga that helps you fight addiction.   There is yoga for beginners and the advanced.  There is yoga that both beginners and advanced practitioners do together.  There is yoga for people scared of yoga, and there are yoga competitions where people watch other people do yoga.

Second, we can’t truly identify its religious roots.  We think it has Hindi roots and we know it contains so many elements of ancient Indian culture, but by now, we’ve stripped it of that.  Those who maintain many old-world elements have already branded their yoga, some by branding the system of postures and some by labeling it with their name.  Here, and everywhere else, we are free to explore yoga postures and yogic movements at our discretion and exercise gurus and companies have watered it down here.  Accomplishing a yoga program every day takes a level of focus and dedication that’s missing in America.  If we all treated yoga like a necessary daily activity we’d all understand that focus and dedication enough to apply it to other parts of our life.

Third, its not about looking good, and if you’re mind is on looking good as you do it, and not executing postures, you will fail (and probably fall).  So mentally, its a healthier format of exercise than say, joining a gym just to worry for two hours about what you need to fix on your flabby body.  Yoga fixes from the inside out, which is also the way the United States needs to be fixed.

The ‘State of Fitness’

Posted by scalesonfire on December 2, 2010
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

The United States has a problem that has drained the life and dignity out of our once great nation.  We are living up to perceptions.  We are considered lazy, and we do all we can to support that perception.  We delve in the unnecessary, and it’s created a purposeless society, filled with products and traditions that debunk rationality.  Although partisanship rules government, liberalism is at the core of our individual behavior.  We are raised on “easy ways out” and on “getting by.”  Terms are improperly defined here: “shame” has more to do with a society-influenced superficial shame (i.e. “I won’t wear that, because it makes me look fat”) than a shame at abandoning true personal principles (i.e. “It bothers me when my children are so lazy.  Is that my fault as a parent?”).  As a society, our aim seems to be to keep the appearances of things for each other, all the while working for ourselves in situations we truly don’t care for.  Even worse, we look for help with things we should be doing on our own.  The deathly combination of these factors has created a dynamic that might have frightened our founding fathers.  A culture built on superficiality, filled with people who can’t do basic things for themselves, made up of families that live in discontentment for generations.

All in all, it sounds like a great deal of unhappy fat people, too many battered self-esteems, and a childhood obesity problem that’s caused the entire nation to take notice.  Growing up with this problem festering all around me, I was lost in it also.  I believed that physical fitness, whether for athletic performance or aesthetic effect, required certain things, all of them expensive, and all of them working much better than the basic methods I was taught originally.  From expensive gym memberships to supplements that I’d be afraid to take now, I decided that I needed certain things to be fit and live a lifestyle that I deemed perfect.  It was perfect to me especially because I felt others envied it.  But fitness, being a basic need, shouldn’t be a point of envy, and if a person is envious of another who is handling a basic human need, then they’ve already acknowledged a class system that shouldn’t exist.

How could it be fixed?  In America, when there is a need, first industry is created.  So fitness, such a small element of our culture for generations, became one of its largest the more self-esteems became lost.  The more people forgot the notion that fitness is a basic need and saw fitness as a way to look like others they envied, the more companies began to capitalize on the insecurities of the public.  Injecting body image envy into a society that already struggled with valuing personal accomplishment, was devoid of shame, and was too lazy to ever understand the proper processes of most things, has proved to be a toxic concoction.  Fitness, as a selling tool became much more about results without process, paying for elements that should be completely free, and a bombardment with images that now create deep envy in the human psyche.  The fitness industry grew and has thrived this way.  They are out to help people do amazing things without real work, make them pay for things they’ve never needed, and constantly show them images of ways they should be.  If any other industry operated this way, there would be outrage.

In fitness, it’s considered positive, and people who do the direct opposite (usually with great success) are seen as negatively impacting the others.  In fact, the fitness industry cares very little about these individuals unless they are elite athletes who are being used to rile the envy of the public.  Those who approach fitness properly are simply not acknowledged by the fitness industry, and just aren’t counted as active people.  The less an individual spends on things like gyms, infomercial videos, and cheesy personal trainers, the more ostracized they are from the fitness industry.  I’m calling for real active people to take back the industry that I know is rightfully theirs.  I think that if the fitness industry became more about the active, and less about the inactive, then we’d see the real faces of fitness.  We’d see the individuals who are dedicated to their practices.  We’d see the individuals who laugh at those who’d like to simply look the ways they look without any understanding of their daily effort.  I believe that we’d learn deeper definitions of discipline and determination and that these understandings would improve our lives far past fitness.

That scares the fitness industry, and I do know that the basis of industry is to capitalize on a need.  I simply believe that artificially creating that need for the industry’s betterment is insidious in nature.  I also believe that if the need is a natural and basic one, that this practice can cripple a nation, which I believe it has.

My goal, as a personal trainer, an active person, and an American, is to be the foremost voice of reform on this issue.  I’ve come to understand in training my clients that encouraging their superficiality, promoting fitness industry gimmicks I know would never work in my own life, and appealing to their comforts will make my job and their process more difficult later.  In this way, the fitness industry, through careful execution, public ignorance and laziness, and a nationwide air of superficiality, has made people even more fat and depressed than ever.  The more people look in the mirror and become depressed with what they see, the more they pump money into this multi-billion dollar industry.   I’ll be using Scalesonfire.com to first build the case against the fitness industry, second, to explain the ways active people properly execute fit lifestyles, and last to reform the reasons we should exercise.  If we want a fitter, healthier country, we’ll have to be different people.  Today, I’m standing up to lead us there.

The Fitness Conservative

Posted by scalesonfire on July 9, 2010
Posted in: fitness Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

As I was told in an English class my first day of college, America is a country of binaries.  The next thing that professor did was write a long list of existing binaries on the chalk board for us to write about.  While everyone chose young/old, rich/poor, or skinny/fat, I tackled Republican/Democrat, and I was the only one.  That in-class essay was a four-hundred word diatribe on the methods rich republicans use to keep poor democrats poor, thus forever perpetuating the plight of democrats and minorities especially.  That essay might go much differently today.  It’s not that I’ve switched allegiances or that Id go back and vote Republican if I could, I just have a much more clear understanding of what it means to be a Republican, Democrat, or anything else.  I know why talking head Republicans on television are always yelping about big government and taxes.  I know why minorities feel so comfortable when Democrats are in office.  What I also know is that none of our problems can really be fixed with ideology because the bridge between ideology and action is one you have to build first, after that, crossing the bridge every day is easy.  The world’s reluctance to build that bridge properly since the beginning of civilization tells me that the human race is going to arguing about politics until politics causes their extinction.

Maybe a Ron Paul-style fitness libertarian movement is what we need, some say it's already going on.

I’m more apt to taking a side, the conservative side, when it comes to my profession.  When it comes to being fit and explaining it to others, I’m not only a conservative, I’m a libertarian. I feel like a right-wing columnist writing for the New York times, a right-wing television host on MSNBC, or a Republican candidate trying his best to swing votes from a Democratic incumbent.  In other words, the rest of the world is too liberal on exercise, and Scalesonfire.com has just become
the FOX News of fitness.

I’d like the podium.

American people, what I’m going to tell you may shock you, mostly because it’s not what you’re used to hearing.  The fitness industry, our current administration, is addicted to spending.  Now, just to be clear, that’s your spending they’re addicted to.  They’ve done an incredibly clever job of finding ways to get you to believe you need certain things-most of which involve spending money and full dependence on a method, program or activity.  The country is also overrun with people who support these methods, praise them as if they work, but also do things that adversely effect the methods and still expect results.  It’s bad enough that these fitness liberals working in the fitness industry push this agenda of comfort and dependence, thinking that increasing the government and turning it into a large machine fueled by corporations is really good for people trying to be active and fit, but most regular fitness liberals, raised and spoiled on the current system have no idea why they vote for the current administration, they just do, and continue to believe ridiculous lies.  They continue to use a calorie system much like our system of personal spending by: overeating for no particular reason the way many say liberals over-spend; eating and thinking that the food “doesn’t count” and doesn’t effect the body the way liberals are said to pile up credit; and they treat fitness and nutrition like a debit program, giving here, taking there, rewarding themselves, and never, ever exercising enough.

Sound familiar? The truth is that just like in our society where the poor outnumber the rich, so-called “minorities” outnumber the whites, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives, in fitness, the liberals outnumber the conservatives and the fat outweigh the skinny.   The reason may be the same ones we have in politics. Liberals believe in family, support, the village raising the child, big government, working families, having a choice.  They think that conservatives are harsh, xenophobic, simple, oppressive, and old-fashioned.  Conservatives believe in values, saving, small government, personal independence, and understanding the rules of life.  They think that liberals are lazy, frivolous, self-pitying and dependent.

Many of those things are also ways fit and fat people describe each other, and in the very same ways the arguments and animosity between the two sides continues to brew.  Think of gyms as the different political television programs and news organizations you see.  Bally’s is ‘Meet the Press’ Gold’s Gym is ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’  If you look closely at a gym, you’ll automatically see the liberal or conservative aim they have.  Sometimes, cheap things are sold on television with the aim of coaxing liberals into thinking conservatively for a brief second, and that is how info-mercial schemes for everything from diet plans to pull-up bars control large segments of the population.  It’s the same way there are television commercials offering deals on foreclosed homes or credit consolidation in the middle of the day, while only hardcore liberals are at home-selling typically conservative ideas to liberals is a way to have liberals make you rich.

The comparison is much deeper than media though.  In politics and fitness, there are not only liberals and conservatives, but amongst liberals there are: Democrats, or people who think that any workout plan should work for them if they work for it and they will always vote for it in such a case and be completely turned off when it’s not, socialists and communists, or people who think that exercise is only enriched in group form, leftists, who think that hard work at the gym means the gym is elite and should provide comfort and luxury for its members (see also, things that have nothing to do with being fit), liberal media, or people and organizations who show fitness a small part of life amongst the many beautiful, tasty and lazy things out there and mock fitness more than enrich it.  Amongst conservatives there are: Republicans, or people who think that the system is them working every day for themselves enriching their own lives with exercise no matter in which form it comes, Tea Partiers, or people who have come to understand that the rules created by the fitness industry are restrictive to real progress and no longer want to pay the monetary ‘taxes’ on frivolous programs that don’t work, Libertarians, or people who believe that the basics that have been provided can run the government and prosper that way (these are typically yogis and calisthenic freaks), and until now, there’s been no real conservative fitness media.

In the coming days, weeks, and months, I’m going to explain why becoming a fitness conservative or a “player” as I call it is the only way to making sure that fitness, exercise, weight and self-esteem are never a problem.  Now, it may cause a lot of political conservatives to rethink their fitness habits or some fitness conservatives to think their political habits, but my aim here isn’t political, it’s to show you that there are some sectors of life where it doesn’t pay to be liberal and that self-rewarding is relative.  I hope to turn everyone I encounter, engage and am employed by into a player.  Scalesonfire.com’s slogan is “Why keep score when you could be a player?” and I implore all of you out there to never be scorekeepers.