Why I Killed My Gym Membership

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Believe it or not, I used to be a regular gym denizen. I had a hard time getting motivated to work out at home and going to the gym was my solution. If I could just get myself to the gym, the rest was pretty much taken care of. Not much else to do there but workout, right?

But I got bored easily. Looking forward to just adding more weight to your lift gets a bit dull after a while. So does competing over equipment covered in other people’s sweat.

Not to mention, there are membership fees, which is just another bill, and another monthly expense.

So I canceled my gym membership and started exploring other ways to get fit.

Right now, martial arts, gymnastics, and hiking are my primary fitness practices.

Along the way I’ve learned a few things about fitness.

  1. You don’t have to hate it. Most people think that working out is a chore, albeit a necessary one. It’s something they must do it stay alive, to not get sick, or to not look scary naked. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Movement is a natural part of living, and something that we should enjoy. If you approach exercise with a sense of drudgery, I encourage you to explore other types of physical activity until you find something you experience joy doing. If you look for it, you will find it.
  2. The world is your gym. You don’t have to own a membership at a building with annoying music and orange, overly muscled men to be healthy and fit. There is a huge opportunity to play and experience nature while getting fit all around you. In the past few months, I’ve explored dozens of trails around my city where I not only exercise my body, but get back in touch with nature.
  3. You don’t need a lot of equipment. I bought a pair of gymnastic rings for $60. That’s about two months of gym dues for a piece of equipment that will probably last me at least five years. I can hang the rings just about place where I can find a suitable tree. If you’re not into rings, or want something even more minimalistic, you can get a door hanging pull-up bar for $30.
  4. Health should be about community. When I’m hiking with my wife, it allows me to remember that health is best cultivated when shared with people you love. When I train in the desert, mountains, and snow with my Jeet Kune Do friends, I find that your physical potential is more meaningfully realized when practicing with others. That’s not a feeling I often got at the gym.
  5. Fitness isn’t just a requirement of life. When we approach exercise as simply a stipulation of living, we diminish its merit. In truth, fitness isn’t just about looking good or even being healthy, it’s much more than that. It’s about embracing the art of movement and expressing the body. The predictable routines of lifting weights or moving on machines in two dimensional movements kills that expression. Weights can be beneficial, but chaos needs to be introduced into our practice to experience the true beauty of physical self development.

This isn’t meant to convince you to kill your gym membership. This is just my perspective and an account of what I’ve learned while exploring a different approach to health and fitness.

I’ll be writing a lot more about my specific practices, strategies that I’m incorporating, and what I learn along the way.

If this alternative approach to health sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll subscribe and join me here.

The True Nature of Bodyweight Exercise

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A long time ago, fitness was just something that occurred naturally. In nature your body adapts to your survival needs and you become as “fit” as necessary to live.

That’s what physical fitness essentially means… the physical capacity to do the necessary work needed to live or perform well in a particular setting.

In nature, fitness happens naturally. But in the modern world, we’ve lost touch with that. Fitness has become more about using unnatural methods of hacking well-being. We go to gyms and lift weights instead of moving our bodies through space and over or around obstacles. We run on treadmills instead of using our feet to transport us.

We’ve gone from being naturally fit to compartmentalizing fitness into an annoying, yet necessary, part of our lives.

Part of this disconnection is living and working in a technological age. We have cars and computers that keep us sitting most of the day. Another part of it is that we’ve come to live in a mind-dominated way. We live in a world where knowledge-based work is priced at a much higher value than physical output. We’re not toiling in the field anymore.

All of this stuff contributes to an amnesia that our mind and body is one organism. They do not exist separately. They are highly interdependent. If you neglect one, the other always suffers.

So fitness isn’t just about the body and it isn’t just about the mind, it’s about the integration of the two.

And that is why I’ve come to appreciate bodyweight exercise so much. It’s a more natural approach to fitness. And with bodyweight training, like gymnastics and hiking for instance, you incorporate the mind much, much more than weight lifting or running on a treadmill.

Not only is bodyweight exercise more natural, it’s more functional. When you’re moving your body through space, you recruit more supportive and balancing muscles than with traditional weight-lifting. That, in turn, creates real-world strength. Not just a pretty physique.

Fitness and intimacy

The less obvious side of coming from a more primal fitness context is the effect it has on your intimacy with life. The more in touch you are with your body, the more you become in tune with it and nature. I’ve found that hiking, martial arts, and yoga are powerful in cultivating closeness with you and your environment.

This level of intimacy increases the more we bring our practices into nature. We don’t have to just wait until we are moving our bodies to realize this closeness, though. We can experience it just by taking a moment to be aware of ourselves, our bodies, and our environment. Regularly “flooding” these things with consciousness is a good way to recenter yourself.

The more we can bring our physical practice outside of just the gym, the more we can realign with the true nature of fitness: intimacy with life.

Ultimately, the true nature of fitness is to become more in tune with our bodies and our environment. Our bodies are our vehicles for life, and the more we live in our harmony with it, the more effectively we live.

Of course, bodyweight exercise is just about the physical expression of fitness. Realizing fitness and health in every aspect of our lives should be our ultimate aim.