Is your gym making you FAT?

July 9, 2009 - PRLog -- A state of the art health club recently opened in Castle Hill where I live. A gleaming beacon of exercise, it cost millions to build and features an expansive climate-controlled fitness floor and a soaring wall of windows. Like most Australian health clubs the facility reserved its nerve center to house its greatest treasure hundreds of futuristic and impossibly sleek cardio- and strength-training machines. Walking these aisles is like entering the showroom of a sports car dealer ship!




You can’t help but touch the things, to rub their cool slate-gray exteriors and to squeeze their padding. The mechanical housing has become more unisex, the digital readouts more technical, and the end result is an impressive ability to make you forget that this is the same basic collection of machines that have anchored the floors of health clubs for almost four decades. There are leg-extension, leg-press, leg-curl, and upper-body workstations in the aisles for building muscle, and treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary cycles in the aisles for developing cardio fitness. You can do preacher curls, concentration curls, hammer curls, dumbell curls, barbell curls in fact any curls you can think of I'm pretty sure you can do it here.




On Monday afternoons, it humms with activity. Men and women jot down strict noiseless reps on a range of machines, runners bang out kilometres on treadmills and one girl raced away on an elliptical machine, legs neither running nor swinging, but doing something undescribable in a feverish Road Runner–like blur. It’s a vision of exercise utopia that is mirrored in gyms across the country. Except that a growing chorus of critics find fault with it. The man jackknifed into the leg extension machine could be risking knee injury, the exercisers slaving away on other stationary machines are building individual muscles in place of whole body strength, the people slogging away on the treadmills with their eyes glued to TV screens seem like robots.


No wonder the attrition rate for gym members is around 35 percent a year and the latest estimates show that almost half of exercisers give up on a new routine within a year. It seems fair to ask if health clubs are partially responsible for the obesity epidemic, a trend that has followed the rise of the industry. Perhaps the first development has not been caused by the second, but it certainly hasn’t been helped either. With all the fancy equipment and with all the desire out there to look good, why can’t we keep the weight off? Why can’t we stick to our gym workouts? Is it our fault? Or does the fault lie elsewhere?





The health club culture tries to create a dependency on machines. If you have a limited amount of time to work out, you’re better off ditching the machine to do different kinds of body weight and whole body exercises. You’ll burn energy for your time spent. Critics also agree that a traditional machine regimen has other downfalls. In general, it relies excessively on the discipline of the exerciser, it promotes training muscles in isolation, and it can stress vulnerable joints more than necessary.






There is potential for pain in any workout. The key to preventing injury is to find your weaknesses and then modify your exercise to strengthen your weak links, while also not putting stress on them. The three most common strength training injuries are rotator cuff problems, knee issues, and lower back pain. While these are not exclusive to machine-based training, the nonfunctional movements that some machines require, coupled with heavy loads and less than perfect form, can cause problems especially in men over 40 whose joints are getting creaky.





CrossFit uses constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity across broad time and modal domains. By CrossFitting you are drastically reducing your risk to injury and promoting good health for life! TOTALLY different from some chain or brand named globo gyms!

www.crossfitnorwest.com



CrossFit Norwest is the fastest growing fitness concept in the world. CrossFit is constantly vaired functional movements performed at high intensity, measured across broad time and modal domains.