Do Yourself A favor.

• By vishwa on Health, Inspiration, Nutrition, Training

• August 11, 2011

The gym is all appearance and no substance. It is only because we have a lot of fancy-looking equipment that we impress everyone who knows little or nothing about training. Because we have spent a lot of money on marginal, useless and sometimes dangerous equipment we must encourage our members to use it. We never encourage the old-fashioned basic exercises. In fact, to save you from being tempted to use the latter, you will never find a power rack or lifting platform here, and the squat racks we have are flimsy and unused. Who on earth wants to squat? Too much like hard work. Our instructors are as useless as we are, though some of them have very good physiques due to excellent genetics and use of steroids.
To deter you from using the time-proven most productive (but most uncomfortable) exercises, we have joined ranks with other gyms to perpetuate the hokum that basic barbell exercises are dangerous and, at best, only useful for beginners who are not fortunate enough to train in a modern well-equipped gym like ours. This is convenient for us, though, because we barely know the first thing of instructing safe and productive technique in the biggest and best barbell exercises. We promote the idea that you need a wide variety of isolation and machine exercises in every workout.
We make exercise fun. You can watch yourself in the many mirrors we have, listen to music we entertain you with, talk while you train, and ogle the skimpily clad bodies of the genetically blessed, sensual female instructors we employ to keep you (men) interested in renewing your membership. Training here is fun, and fun means lots of members, though few of them stay long term. We depend on a constant influx of new members to make a profit.
Welcome to this gym. We promise we will not push you hard, and we hope you will enjoy your time here. That is, you will enjoy it until you realize that the methods we promote will not help make you big and strong unless you have fantastic genetics or are pumped up with steroids. Or like our regulars you will decide to forget about getting big and strong, and come here only for social contacts and visual kicks.

The above paragraphs are quoted from the book Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert.

Now, it’s time to answer my query: The favor which you do for yourself is to not join these gyms. Ironically, you will find these gyms in abundance. They are indeed fooling people. You would do a lot better if you can explore your own fitness regime. For example, you could jog/sprint for two or three days in a week; and in the remaining days, you can perform various calisthenics such as pushups, pullups, situps, squats, etc. You will obviously accomplish more if you can follow the above suggested routine than enrolling in these gyms. Beware of the glamour and glitz, and think twice if you want real results.