Here’s a harsh truth about fitness that you don’t often hear – exercise sucks. For some of us anyway. I envy those people I see posting online about their completed half-marathons, with messianic zeal (“I feel so alive!”). For people like myself, there’s no redemptive “endorphin rush”. Exercising is just a repetitive bore to be dreaded and endured. If a Slendertone-thingy machine actually did the same job with electronic pads, as I sprawled on the sofa watching Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club, I’d sell my children’s kidneys to buy it. Worst of all, tedious though it is, for most, exercise is beyond beneficial, it’s vital – health, wellbeing, weight, the lot – so we slackers just have to park our bad attitudes and crack on.
There’s a giant con at the heart of exercise – that is, a lot of effort goes into hard-selling it as “FUN!”, when, for many people, it frankly isn’t. Right now, there’s a backlash against enterTRAINment (see what they did there), where people are enticed into “boutique gyms” to do classes that are new, trendy, fusion-themed – high-intensity hula-hooping or whatever. One argument is that, in this climate, anything that gets people into gyms is great, but others think that people would be better off with low-key targeted workouts. All very interesting, but maybe it’s fundamentally counterproductive to keep pushing this idea that exercise per se is supposed to be fun. Why not just tell people the truth: it’s a relentless boring nightmare and you’re going to have to do it anyway.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OtPlwB
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