Monday, July 30, 2012

Gym: Should I stay or should I go?

What's it matter? I don't know.

Exercise, it seems to me is a sport for the rich. Only in an affluent society would you be able to eat enough food and have enough time to do nothing that you would actually need to exercise for health reasons. In third world countries people spend all day working and then barely have enough food to eat when they go home. So if I were to pay to go to the gym, that would be saying I have so much spare cash that I can both eat more than I need to, work less than all day and still have enough to pay somebody to make me fit. That just feels arrogant.
Maybe I should be doing a more physical type of work and sit at a desk for les hours in the day? But I suppose that would be trading off mental exercise for physical exercise?
So maybe a better way to look at it is that I spend 8 hours a day training my mind to get better at computer games; And then I spend 2 hours a week in a gym training my body to be able to easily ride my bike to work and carry the odd 20kg pail of chemical?

Training should be more strenuous than your regular exercise. And I’m fit if I can do all the things I want to do with relative ease.

I don’t know I still haven’t convinced myself. I remember the last time I had a gym membership I had a goal to complete my DofE and had set several milestones along the way. Once that goal was accomplished every time I went I kept thinking “Why am I inside? Why aren’t I at the beach?” and other similar themes.

Unless I call the gym a social activity… that could work. I’m exercising my emotional self just like when I go dancing (although I seem to count dancing for everything). I’m pretty happy with my physical/mental/spiritual fitness levels but my emotional fitness is a bit harder to gauge.

The gym would also give me something new to recover from, just like those 50k bike rides that I hardly ever do.

Hmm Ok so probably the only barrier is #3 and #9, if the gym can be fun then its probably not a waste of time and therefore would be worth the cash.

1 comment:

  1. Audiobooks work well. Having someone to go with works better.

    Eddie and I went to Jetts until we had to leave Bundy, with the advantage of being open 24 hours. The majority of our visits were when we realised we were both awake at 11pm / 2am and had no plans tomorrow, so we'd just head to the Gym for an hour or two.

    Or hey, maybe you could get an exercise bike and sit it in front of your keyboard, since you're home alone for now

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