I remember during my initial orientation session at the gym, the trainer kept emphasizing that cardio alone was not going to help me meet my needs; he assured me that results would come too slowly, that I wouldn’t build enough muscle/core strength for better health, and that I would get frustrated and quit. Nice trick – calling someone who you’ve known for three minutes and hasn’t signed up yet a quitter. But he stressed that I needed a robust routine of weights and cables; weights and cables, weights and cables. He kept repeating the phrase, painting it as the only way to truly reach my goals. And he always pivoted off this point to the gym’s “offer” to sell me a package of sessions with a professional trainer to design an ideal weights and cables routine, as well as go over my diet.
I’ve been reading random articles on-line as well, just trying to familiarize myself with the lingo and the conventional wisdom of losing weight at the gym. You get the usual buzzwords – interval training, post-workout burn, that sort of thing – and once in awhile I find in another article that same borderline hostility towards cardio equipment. This one trainer (who didn’t neglect to mention HIS marvelous training system, available for purchase) vaguely cited a “CBS News Report” claiming that the calorie meters on cardio equipment could be over-estimating calorie burn by as much as 20%, and that it was all risky anyway since you could negate the whole workout by eating a doughnut. There’s no reason that you couldn’t eat a doughnut and equally spoil a workout with weights and cables, weights and cables; but I digress.
I’ll admit it has influenced me, and I always turn to strength exercises after my time on the elliptical. But I found myself thinking – if cardio equipment is truly as inaccurate and ineffective as these people are saying, why is it everywhere you look in gyms?
Well, unless gym owners of America feel like saying with one voice “we just buy that stuff to trick ignorant fat people into thinking they’re making progress”, then the vehemence of this attitude is probably not purely-science based. The machines work if you’re willing to push yourself – I’m already losing weight so I know they do. And I do believe that adding the strength component has helped; I’ll happily acknowledge that. But what incentivizes the outright antipathy I’m noticing from select folks?
I think it comes back to sales. If a guy comes into your establishment and knows what he needs, he’s going to buy it and not buy anything else. So the first thing many salesmen will do is try to make you feel completely out of your depth; to the point where the customer is all but begging to give you more money so you’ll take that sense of fear and confusion away. I got good at this trick back in my luggage-selling days – I remember someone walking in the door, thinking they were going to spend $100 on a bag. By the time I’d finished quizzing them on their travel plans, and hinting in worried tones about all the contingencies they should be prepared for and the durability they were going to want out of their luggage, it became a $700 sale.
Cardio equipment – all those programmed “routines” aside – is fairly easy to understand. You pick a thing, get on the thing, you run/pedal/climb/whatever, you sweat, and you can track how hard you’ve worked in multiple ways.
But strength training is inherently more mysterious; just because there are so many highly-specialized options, all of which look like they could injure you. Which muscle groups? How much weight? How many reps? How many sets? I’ve cobbled together my own routine by applying the general wisdom of making sure each major part of the body – arms, legs, back, abs – hurts relatively equally by the time I’m done. But I don’t know that everyone thinks that way. Once they peer into that room full of contraptions, and start believing that the ideas with which they walked in the door are naive and doomed to failure, their brain is going to change tunes from “I know what I’m doing” to “I need help! Please, sir, let me buy some help from you!”
Like I said, I think the ideas are based in sound science, and I’ve adjusted my workout accordingly. But I’m starting to believe that the irrational emphasis I encounter here and there is a sign of the profit motive doing its thing.