Legal disclaimer... The following views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the creator of No Fat Jokes Please, or that of legitimate blog posters.
"I'm a do as I say, not as I do kinda trainer" Achieving ODJ
Just over two years and over 100 blog posts, and finally the day has come! This is the first, and quite possibly the last time, Ole JT and I are reversing roles. I find myself torn between publishing an outright rant centered around the absurdity of spending up to 10 hours a day in a place most people avoid like the plague, or proffering sage fitness advice (the original direction of the blog). Anyone who believes that last sentence is clearly a first time reader! We all know where this is going.
You see, I arrived in this industry via a very different route than most 20 somethings who've always been fit, and grew up wanting to work in fitness. Deep down, I'm more like the leery potential members in those awesome Planet Fitness commercials. I cringe, daily, at the idiosyncratic gym experience. It's not an unfair stereotype, if it's always true. This was a second career direction for me. I chose to capitalize on the spiraling American obesity trend, knowing it meant job security. Just as it is not in your doctor's best interest for you to be healthy, it is not in a trainer's best interest for you to be fit. The differentiator; sick people will continue to go to the doctor, clients that are not succeeding will stop paying their trainer. If only we could be paid by insurance companies... Depending on which studies you believe, there are about 600 million people in this country considered obese, so don't cry for us, Argentina. We trainers won't go wanting for new clients any time soon.
I honestly believe there needs to be a place like Planet Fitness, that discourages gym guys from being gym guys. There's a large segment of society that needs to be in the gym, but won't go because they are intimidated by the knuckle draggers. That said, they are the gym equivalent of having a Diet Coke with your chocolate cake. Life in a real gym is a whole other animal. Being a cynical person, stuck in this bizarre world, I have seen more than I care to recall. Some things cannot be unseen. Like the sight of a smarmy unkempt eastern European rinsing off in the deck shower of the pool, naked. Like the waist-height hole in the wall between shower stalls in the men's locker room, that, no matter how many times it was filled, kept getting re-bore. Like the septuagenarian female client who insisted on working out in a tacky 80's era G-string leotard with control top pantyhose and heels (yep).
Well done JBK. Well done! You kept it PG while not losing your good ole snark. There is a place in the blogosphere. Hopefully it won’t be writing on census numbers... If there are 600 million fatties in a 300 million American population, you must be counting every foreigner visiting this great country’s beaches, amusement parks and casino buffets. I kid because I care!
ReplyDeleteThis blog has become a place where observation humor goes to die. Jaron and I are the worse with inside jokes, and unfortunately for the few dedicated readers who have to slog through our two-man shorthand we do not attempt to hide it or do a good job of explaining the joke. A great deal of our commonality goes back nearly two decades. While sitting on couches in our bachelor pad broke Fat Jaron and broke Fat Jarvis would find entertainment by ridiculing and mocking American cultural mores. No Fat Jokes Please is just a snap shot of what’s presently making us laugh. I would love to say I write for the masses, but with a trainer and side-kick like Jaron “The ODJ,” little or no reader will go unscathed in our written journey through fitness.
Our real passion in the gym, and especially in this blog, is to see who can make the other horse-laugh about obscure human personality quirks. Most people that we see in the gym and in the vast fitness universe are two-dimensional. They have no personal connection to us. They are caricatures of western civilized meat puppets, and we are merely trying to get a laugh at the larger collective behavior. So if you’re pledging allegiance to the latest fitness fad, lifting heavy with bad form to impress, or eating some celebrity diet in a can to cut a corner don’t get too annoyed over what two pre-forty-somethings write in a hack blog – you’re privilege to have time to exercise and read this electronic medium should be enough to overcome our collateral mockery.