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All posts tagged liberal

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.

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

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.

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.