The greedy gym owners are a silent member of the muscle mafia left with a large piece of the pie. The gym business is a billion dollar industry sponsored by fatsos and skinny dudes from all over the world. The primary goal of the large commercial chains is to attract more and more customers and lure them into signing a membership contract that generates the highest possible revenue. Very few training facilities care about educating people and showing them how to accomplish meaningful goals. Most gym owners just make the place as fancy as possible so that bald rich guys with beer bellies punching numbers in front of several monitors all day can come later in the evening and pay extra cash to run on the newest treadmill while wearing a T-shirt saying ”Pain is just a weakness leaving the body.”
It’s not a coincidence that the walls of most gyms are decorated with posters of muscular men in bikinis. There are also trucks of free to read bodybuilding magazines on the floor – all of them are full of poisonous info. Just like the media, the greedy gym owners want people to believe that the sky is the limit if you are willing to work hard in THEIR gym.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this scam many times. One my first gyms was an underground basement. The place was almost as dirty as a canal full of rats. The toilet was not working, and the disgusting dungeon smelled terrible. The ”locker room” was a storeroom with a broken chair inside. On a few occasions, I found steroid needles there. This was not a surprise since the gym had a decent concentration of high-level pinners.
One time I was at the protein bar getting ready to pay for the next month. I had calculated that I was going to need 12 workouts. I was just about to give the cash when the gym owner, a stupid looking village king, tried to convince me to pay for 16 workouts instead. He even asked me about my routine in an attempt to explain why 16 workouts are better than 12. I looked at this sucker’s moronic face and the only thing I saw was greed, misplaced yellow teeth and stupidity, of course. I thought, ”This sucker is making so much money from all the steroid monkeys here, and yet he can’t fix the toilet? What am I paying for? Urine smell?”
Later the very same dude opened a couple of new gyms located at crucial points of the city. In other words, money was not a problem for him. He just had a different business model for the underground steel storage. Why make it pretty if the pigs are happy to live in the dirt? Just use the money to open new shiny gyms, sit back and enjoy the traffic of yoga pants and the cash flow from the mainstream crowd.
Why do we go to the barbell house by the way? The primary reason to visit a gym is to gain access to equipment that is otherwise unavailable to you. Everything else is a result of this. That’s why the gym owners benefit a lot from convincing people that they need an incredible amount of machines and iron to get strong and/or in shape. The truth is that you don’t need much at all. Depending on what you do, you can get away with a pull-up bar, a dip station, a power rack and maybe a leg press. You definitely don’t need machines from the future to get the job done.
”Hahaha. This machine will make me a lot of money,” says the greedy gym owner while giving his card to the cashier to pay for the next revolutionary cardio machine that supposedly shows your sperm count while you are burning fat.
The gym drama reminds me of a bigger problem – home ownership. What’s the most expensive thing that ordinary people buy? A roof over their heads.
Why are homes so expensive? The materials? The land, which technically does not belong to anyone? What is the justification? I will tell you what – the greed of the homeowners. And who are the homeowners? It’s a cartel consisting of investors, construction companies, governments and banks. They all want to keep the price of real estate property high because everybody needs it. You can live without an expensive watch, a car or a computer, but you need a place to crash when Sub Zero is swinging his insecure cock outside.
Ultimately, the whole system wants us to be insects that don’t own anything meaningful. The rich dudes would be very happy if we remain stupid consumers buying stupid things that depreciate as soon as you purchase them. I see gyms as a form of real estate that takes advantage of similar dynamics.
Many will argue that the modern gym industry is actually a victim of the global brainwashing and not a part of the scheme. Some gym owners will tell you that they just want to please their customers. The truth, however, is that the gym industry accepted the plug and play concept a long time ago. They just want you to do as you have seen in the movies. If you have questions, just hire one of the shaved personal trainers with bitch tits who supposedly know how to get even Winnie-the-Pooh ripped and ready for a contest.
So, what is the solution? A home gym? That’s fine, but not beneficial in all cases. You can just limit your gym visits to a bare minimum instead of using barbell plates as a pillow. A common way to accomplish this is to train legs in the gym and all else in the park or your home.
Besides, if people were to eliminate gym visits completely, what would the ambassadors of Synthol such as Rich Piano do? Who will look at their muscles? More importantly, who will look at your muscles and strength accomplishments?
I think you could get away with nothing but a power rack and barbell. Although some machines can be helpful.
As I understand it, Arthur Jones’s intentions was to create machines that would stimulate stress of the muscles better while eliminating unnecessary stress on the skeleton. Leg press vs squat is a good example. Also machine curls which offer resistance through the entire range of motion compared to the barbel curl.
However, what’s required to make $$$ will usually result in lies, twisted truths, and a change of intentions.
The result? The usefulness or possible superiority of machines are exaggerated for marketing purposes. Gym owners fill their gyms with more equipment to make it look better to please/lure members. And brainless dumb asses who got their results from steroids and happen to be proponents of barbells offer dogmatic pseudoscience to argue machines vs free weights.
The “this vs that” or “us vs them” argument always creates controversy and boosts exposure. Ford vs Chevy, Bush vs Obama, apple vs samsung, HIT vs volume, it’s all a bunch of bullshit. And most people are dumb enough to believe it.
Perhaps the people involved chasing the $$$ eventually say “fuck it, if they want to get ripped off, why not take advantage and be one one to do the ripping and make some money?”
Is it any different than lying on your resume to get a job? We’ve all got to eat. Some people just need to eat more and/or they’re willing to sacrifice more integrity and morals in order to get it.
Heh…reminds me of a casual conversation at a poolside with someone near my age whom I (a 60-year-old lifelong-PED-free who’s trained since age16) recognized as an obvious fellow muscle-head.
Turned out he owned a couple gyms. As any obsessive/addicted muscle-morons do, we discussed iron and ended up discussing genetics and PEDs.
Somewhere along the way, I mentioned how simple bodybuilding truly is — that, to reach one’s genetic mass-and-proportion potential and then to stay lean, only a barbell, squat racks, maybe a chinning bar, the patience and perseverance to progressively bodybuild for at least two consistent, consecutive years, and the knowledge enough to reduce average daily calories by 500 per day below maintenance in order to lose bodyfat, are all that the average-gened natural needs.
He chuckled in agreement, and replied, “But, if we tell people that, all us gym owners will be out of business!”
Here where I live the gym is $2.5 per entry. And recently the government giving free $100 to spend at any section of the stadium including the Gym