Penny smart, Dollar Stupid

Today I’m going to give you guys a little investment advice. I’m no Warren Buffet but I really do believe that if you listen carefully to the following advice I think you will get a good return on your investment.

I’m talking money wise and training wise here and I’m also going to be calling out certain people and places. If you find yourself being offended then yes i am talking to you and this advice is for you.

A few times a week the topic of fitness and weight training pops up in conversation and one of the most common occurrences is when after listening to someone’s problems, I ask them where they work out and they get a little quiet, they shake their head and they reluctantly admit that they work out at Planet Fitness. You can see the shame in their face almost as if they admitted to spying on their country or cheating on their wife. The second most common occurrence, and one I find much more annoying is the pompous and arrogant statement of “I have better things to spend my time and money on then going to the gym.” This statement usually comes from older people who generally make quite a bit more money then average people, or young people who think they make way more money then most people. It’s quite common for the same people who go to planet fitness to also say they think spending time and money on fitness is stupid. I ultimately find this ironic because the business model of Planet Fitness is to make sure people stay unfit, but for 10 dollars a month. Why not just save the 10 bucks and stay unfit at home for free? But what the hell do I know about anything?

First off let’s get the qualifying statement out of the way, not because I’m worried about offending anyone who may be going to Planet Fitness, but because I actually want you to keep reading long enough to benefit yourself. Planet Fitness is better then nothing, for sure and it may be possible that for some people that is the only gym they have access to at this point in their life. That’s fine because sometimes you have to just make do with what you have. But almost everyone with some serious muscle building or strength goals realizes that Planet Fitness and others like it are marginal gyms at best and ill equipped to handle the goals of someone moderately serious.

Health and fitness is one of the most important investments that most people can make in their life and it is also one of the easiest. The cost of a gym membership is a pretty small price to pay compared to all the benefits and a few hours a week surely isn’t too hard to do.

First lets talk training and lame gyms. A cheap chain gym may seem like a good monetary investment at only 10 dollars a month but what are you really getting for that 10 dollars? A pizza party on Fridays? Access to a ton of inferior, feminine colored machines? Bagels in the morning? Which one of these things is going to get you to your fitness goals faster? Since all the junk food isn’t going to help you, lets tackle the issue of the machines. Machines are just not the most efficient way to get stronger and build muscle. Fundamentally, when was the last time you had to exert your leg or arm maximally while in a seated position? Honestly tell me. Have the basics of human movement evolved so much since the invention of the smart phone that we have to create all these fancy new machines to train these new movement patterns? How did Eugene Sandow, Paul Anderson, Reg Park and John Grimek build their strength and physiques before such advanced machines were created?

The big basic barbell exercises are the simplest, most efficient way to create strength and muscle especially in beginners. Barbells can accommodate small incremental loads and they can continue being used and scaled up indefinitely. The very same barbell that can build a 225 pound bench press can build a 500 pound bench press. The four basic barbell movements also hit the most muscle mass, thru the largest range of motion, resulting in more strength and muscle gains per any given amount of time. Since so many people are at crappy gyms like this to save money maybe they should also look at saving time as well. After-all time is money and time spent in the gym can eat into your time making money, so why not pick the movements that can build the most muscle in the shortest amount of time? Adding ten pounds of muscle will happen much faster under a heavy squat bar then on a purple seated leg extension machine.

Now let’s address the money issue. The people I’m going to hit hard are the people I meet out at the bars and social events who think 30, 40, or 50 dollars a month is too much to spend on a gym membership. What are all of these people doing when they say this to me? Drinking a beer or mixed drink and getting drunk. These must be free beers because because the average beer in my town is about 4.25 or 4.75 and the cheapest real mixed drink is about 6 bucks, and that can add up to more then a monthly gym membership real quick. I bet most of these people aren’t walking out with less then a 20 dollar bar tab any given night, and most are going out a few nights a week, sometimes even eating food too. Just being conservative and saying they go out once a week and have a 20 dollar tab; that’s 80 dollars a month….enough for two memberships at my gym. Are we all starting to see where I’m going with this?

Let’s break it down and look at how long they spend drinking, I’d guess on average about 4 hours each night they go out, conservatively. Simple math shows us that is  16 hours spent each month. The real numbers are likely much higher then this. Please don’t now tell me that it’s hard to find time to go to the gym….. Honestly if you’re serious about getting to the gym then you can cut back on this somewhat and you’re just lying to yourself if you say otherwise.

And now the nail in the coffin, health or lack of it is one of the great equalizers in this world. All the money in the world won’t stave off a heart attack if you insist on eating like shit and not exercising. Sure you can buy a new heart,  but that’s assuming you live thru the heart attack in the first place. What kind of hospital bill will it be after spending a week in the hospital after a heart attack? Or after breaking a bone, or tearing a weak muscle? Taking some kind of interest in fitness and proper diet of any kind is your first, best and most controllable step you can take as far as keeping your health in check.  I have one friend who refused to take weight training seriously and suffered a torn acl, the surgery to fix that costed more then I’ve spent on gym memberships in the last 12 years.  Another friend of mine neglected weight training for years and suffered a shoulder injury that never healed properly that will most likely require surgery one day. This won’t be a free procedure either….

This comes full circle back to the idea of the best results for your time and money spent. 4 hours a week in the gym kept me strong enough to avoid injuries doing the very same activities that hurt my friends and I got a whole host of other benefits as well. A relatively short amount of time spent on the big basic barbell exercises will have a much greater return then the same amount of time spent on inferior machines and the results will be fairly permanent with a fairly low amount of maintenance required just to maintain it.

A gym membership alone won’t be enough but the lasting discipline, knowledge and muscle that come from reaching and exceeding strength and physique goals will make a huge difference later in life. Look at famous lifters who are older men now and compare them to the average penny pinching man, or woman, the same age that you see in the real world and tell me who would you rather be? I look around and at 31 most of my peers from high school look and act as if they were 50 years old. A good friend of mine a few years ago died of a heart attack at age 45. Let’s compare that to one of my bmx heros Dennis Mccoy who at 47 years old won third at the X Games this year and pulled a 900 on the vert ramp like 8 feet high. Which one of those two do you think was eating doughnuts and drinking cases of soda all the time?

Would you rather save 40 dollars a month now and pay for it the rest of your life or would you like to treat your body and health as an investment and spend that 40 dollars now and stave off a $100,000 dollar hospital bill later? The best way to save money is a little bit at a time and to make a habit of it, the same goes for fitness, a little bit now will pay off a lot late