Fitness On The Cheap #1

I love working out. I have suffered from depression, anxiety and maybe a touch of PTSD over the year and nothing has touched any of that like exercise has. I also just love how it helps me do my daily life better. I'm going to do a series of 'Fitness on the Cheap' posts about how to get or stay fit without wasting a ton of money on bullshit gyms or equipment. Fitness suffers when you don't have any money and there's no real reason for it. So here it is, post #1 of Fitness On The Cheap.

I made a post the other day about shop-bought pasta sauce in jars. How it is cheap enough that you don't notice it but expensive enough that the manufacturer makes a good profit.

This is a key principle in selling shit to you that you do not need. For a few days it's made me start noticing where else I'm seeing it. One of those places is gym membership.

I like exercise and the value of fitness is maybe something for another post. I used to be a member of a gym, DW Fitness. It was around £36 a month. You don't really notice it in amongst all the other bills. But if you sit down and think about it, that's quite a lot of money over the year. Enough for a holiday.

The gyms count on you not realising that. It's also kind of well known that most people who take out gym memberships rarely use them. The gyms also count on that too. They need people not to go because if everyone did go they'd need a building three times the size. To make a profit they need to sell as many memberships as possible and run a gym that is as small as possible. So they want people not to go. Gyms like to pretend they are selling fitness. They aren't, they want you to not train. They want you to not come. They want you to stay unfit and keep paying the direct debit because, well, one day I'll sort it out...

There is a simple answer. Train at home.

There really isn't a huge need to join a gym for the average person. Another thing gyms like to do is have massive variety. Every piece of equipment under the sun is crammed into some old done-up industrial unit. They make you think you need it. If you want to get fit you have to have a... whatever.

You know what you need? You need to be able to just get up. That's it.

I've trained fairly hard for twenty five years. To hit a decent level of fitness you need a way of doing strength trainging, a way to do some cardio and a way to do some flexibility work. You can get all of that at home for free.

Cardio is the easiest thing to start with. You need some way of doing slow and steady and another of doing fast and intense. No-one needs the dozen different cardio machines in a gym. You absolutely do not need a treadmill (unless you're rehabbing an injury).

Slow and steady, just go for a walk. Putting one foot in front of the other for forty minutes is maybe the single greatest exercise ever devised. If you want to run then run. I'm not a fan of running but it's still great cardio. For intense, find a hill. Or some stairs. If you live in a house that has an upper floor then you have my favourite piece of exercise equipment: the staircase. Run up them and walk down, repeat. Do that 30 times and see how you feel. I guarantee no piece of gym equipment comes close to that workout.

Strength training is another gym con. All the shit that they have, all the machines, all the crap with cables and pulleys, none of that does you any real good. Most of that is fitness industry invention. The movements are unnatural, you need so many machines because each one only ever engages a tiny muscle group.

Take a look at a picture of maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world. Who wouldn't want to look like that? Well, maybe most women but you know what I mean. Ali never lifted a weight in his life. He was a testament to how you can build strength lifting nothing other than the weight of your own body.

Just to reiterate, you do not need all that crap in a gym to get strong. You won't become The Mountain but you can get strong enough for doing daily life for absolutely free.

There are hundreds of bodyweight training programmes out there. One I've used for years is Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym system. You can buy a secondhand copy for under 4 quid. It's great, it's simple and it isn't even that hard. Everything is done slow and controlled.

Another great resource is Onnit. They are an American company part-owned by Joe Rogan. They make supplements and exercise equipment but they also have a massive archive of articles on fitness. Go to the Onnit Academy page and you'll find tons of stuff on bodyweight training, all for free.

Flexibility is the third, and I think the most important part, of fitness. It doesn't matter how strong you are or how far you can run, if you can't turn your neck or stand up without your knees crunching then you are in trouble.

I love doing yoga. This is where I might actually break my mantra of "train at home": yoga classes are usually piss cheap. They are everywhere, from yoga studios to community centres. Spunking 4 or 5 quid once a week on a class is a nice treat. A little bit of coaching really is worth the money.

If that isn't an option then try You-Tube. One of my favourite channels is Yoga With Adrienne. She can be a bit annoying, does a bit too much of that yoga-speak bullshit, but she puts out a lot of decent content. Her 30 days of yoga beginners programme is great. I'll cycle through that a couple of times a year. You can pick up a mat for a couple of quid at Decathlon or Aldi or just use a towel. You don't really need anything else.

Sure there are downsides to training at home. The biggest is the lack of feedback. There is no coach but yourself. You need to really give attention to form and how you are doing everything. It is easy to get into bad habits. There's always the risk that you get injured on your own with no-one to help you out. What you'd need to be doing for that to happen I don't know but it's a risk. Maybe blow out a disk in your back or something, I don't know. You need to be really disciplined with it as well. For some people, and I was one of them, going to another place to train was a big part of gym membership. Especially when I was in a relationship I wasn't enjoying, going to the gym was my escape for a long time.

But I think training at home brings a lot more advantages than downsides. You save a ton of money. £35 a month is about average for a decent gym, that's £420 over the year. But you also have everything else associated with it. Three miles each way adds £150-£200 a year if you're driving and going to the gym five days a week. And as manky as it is, you don't necessarily need a new outfit for each day. Train at home and nobody cares if you wear the same t-shirt you did yesterday.

I really like the flexibility. I've got a garden with high hedges so I can go outside when the weather is nice. I can train whenever I want. I have less excuses: it's never a busy time, it doesn't matter if the traffic is bad. There's no hiding place, either. Gyms give massive opportunity to dick about, to wander around talking to people.

I love training. Fitness is sadly one of those things that tends to suffer with income: it's a rich person's game. Or at least portrayed that way. When you don't have a lot of spare cash then you end up with a lot of other baggage. Stress, depression, anxiety will all come your way at some point. It's too easy to medicate them with alcohol and shit food. Even just the food that is marketed to you encourages lethargy: pasta, rice, bread, sugar, processed shit. Hit you with an insulin spike so that all you want to do is sit in front of the TV. Maybe there is also the lack of good examples. If all you see around you is people living the same way then chances are you will live the same way.

I grew up in a fairly poor, working class area. Nobody went to a gym. When I was little, people had active, manual jobs. As I got older that changed and you saw the impact of that. More sedentary work, more unemployment. Sky TV, Playstations and the internet just hammered more nails into the coffin. Cheap, shit food and drink. Everything about having no money encouraged you stay on the couch. Everyone got fat and looking back that's really fucking sad.

But it really does not have to be like that. There is so much marketing bullshit to make you think that you need money to be fit. You don't, you absolutely don't. In fact, it makes me really fucking angry sometimes when I see how things like this get sold to the public.

You don't need money to get and stay fit. You can very easily achieve a really good level of fitness with absolutely no investment of money whatsoever. For me, I'd recommend the Mark Lauren book I mention above, do some walking, running or cycling and do a little bit of stretching or yoga from You Tube.

If you want to, you can also kit out a decent home gym for less than the cost of a year's membership to a commercial gym. I think my next fitness on the cheap post will be on that.