1. No Pain, No Gain

The Problem

The modern gym is like a football video game – it allows the novice trainee to experience the feeling of accomplishing something without leaving the couch. These sorry excuses for strength training facilities are full of so-called “circuits” of machines that loosely mimic real exercises while taking away any remote possibility of discomfort.

Why it Sucks

Unfortunately, the discomfort you feel when pushing through a heavy bench press or squat is the primary indication that you’re working hard enough to signal the body to grow stronger. Worse, these machines necessarily make assumptions about height, limb length and other biomechanical sizes, angles and leverages, which makes the machines inappropriate for many trainees.

How to Fix it

The fix is simple. First, reorganize the gym to emphasize free weights and cardio. Second, give people fitness programs that are predominantly composed of compound exercises performed with free weights. Third, teach people how to perform those exercises … but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll return to this in a moment.

2. Beauty Parlours on Steroids

The Problem

Strength is approaching passe in the modern gym. Filled with mirrors, spandex-clad gym-queens, teams of personal trainers resembling boy bands, gyms elevate form over function. Any gym sporting tanning beds has disembarked the Good Ship Fitness for the Shores of Narcissism. The Lulu Lemon-clad yoga hordes are taking over, and while there’s nothing wrong with yoga, they better keep their manicured and moisturized hands the hell off my bars, plates, benches and four-post power racks.

Why it Sucks

Strength is underrated. If you want to get a manly physique without taking steroids, you need to lift heavy weights. There’s no getting around it. Broad shoulders, tapered backs, Herculean pecs, powerful legs and arms like cannons don’t come easy. You’ll just never develop a powerful body if you’re preoccupied with looking good at the gym. Gyms are for sweating, grunting, rubbing chalk on your hands and occasionally screaming at weights if that’s what it takes. If you’re still pretty at the end of your workout, you’re not doing it right.

How to Fix it

Again, the organization of a gym is important. Prime space must always be given to four-post power racks, olympic lifting platforms, benches, bars and plates. Stretching mats go in a corner somewhere. Tanning beds go nowhere near a gym unless or until they invent some that don’t give you skin cancer. Moreover, people need to be encouraged to try harder, to train to failure, to sweat, to get their hair messed up, and to stop worrying about looking good. Ever seen a woman clean and jerk more than she weighs? It’s equal parts intimidating and sexy, and no one with half a brain gives a damn that she’s not wearing makeup.

3. Backstreet Trainers

The Problem

You’ve seen these expensive, bleach-blond, overly-tanned personal trainers who look more like boy band wannabes than fitness experts. They’ve got damaged nerve clusters in their backs from the thousands of crunches it took to get those washboard abs. They’ve got water-filled muscles from all the creatine they’ve mixed into their protein shakes. Perhaps more damning, most of them are devoid of any real power because they do too many sets and reps of too many exercises in their relentless pursuit of their toned look. In principle, these douchebags are problematic because normal people would benefit more from modestly-priced weight training classes than overpriced personal training sessions. In practice, these K-Fed lookalikes are problematic because they don’t really know sweet fuck all about weight training. Have you seen the certification exams for personal trainers? They’re a joke. These are the jerk-offs whole tell you that wide grip curls work your inner biceps while close grip curls work your outer biceps or somesuchnonsense while completely missing the fact that lifting weights with your elbows at extreme angles greatly increases your chances of soft tissue injuries.

Why it Sucks

I remember one day I was working out with a couple of olympic weightlifters in a gym near my parent’s home when the local M.Sc.-in-kinesiology-certified-personal-trainer pretty boy started trying to teach a novice trainee to do power cleans. We stared in disbelief. His form was terrible and his advice was worse. One of the guys had to take the poor beginner aside and tell him to get a new trainer, quick, before this jackass got him injured. You may believe that cases like this are rare, but that’s only because most gyms don’t have the benefit of a cohort of expert trainees to point and laugh at these pretty-boy dipshits.

How to Fix it

Fire them. Then demand that the certification courses and exams for personal trainers be improved, and standards raised.

4. Bogus Nutrition Programs

The Problem

Many gyms now offer free diet consultations with the purchase of a membership. You know what they say – you get what you pay for. Here are the two basic principles of nutrition:
1) if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. This is physics. There’s no way around it.
2) Most of the modern industrial diet is composed of synthetic substances that resemble, but are not actually, food (link to real foods post). Eating healthy means eating a diet primarily composes of real food, not artificial non-foods.

This is not what they tell you at gyms. Truth doesn’t sell. Easy sells. So they tell you what you want to hear: ‘just go on eating the sorts of things you’re eating, but try to eat a little less with each meal and cut back on the baconaise (link to disgusting foods post).

Why it Sucks

This isn’t nutrition advice. This is like giving a Band-Aid to a terminal cancer patient. It’s like fighting zombies with brain-scented snausages. Real nutrition advice advice sounds like this: McDonald’s, KFC, chips, candy bars, soda, white bread and white rice are not food. Stop eating these synthetic, poisonous substances altogether. Oh, and while you’re at it, cut your calorie intake by 600 – 1000 kcal/day from now until you’ve lost that extra thirty pounds you’re hauling around. No you do not get cheat days, cheat meals, or cheat anything. And if you overeat today, you can fast tomorrow.

How to Fix it

This is easy. Tell the truth. Some people need encouragement, some need to be yelled at, but telling people that they can go on living like they’re living and expect their bodies to magically firm up is unethical.

5. Injury Causing Machines

The Problem

Finally, there’s the machines themselves. I’ve never found a well-equipped gym that didn’t include a plethora of exercise machines that seemed purposefully designed to injure as many trainees as possible.

Why it Sucks

You are probably not an expert in biomechanics, so how the hell are you supposed to know that the leg extension machine is slowly damaging your kneecap by preventing your tibia from rotating at the top of the lift? Most people don’t receive dramatic injuries, like broken bones, from badly designed weight machines – any machine that snapped wrists would be quickly uncovered as garbage. No… these machines are far more insidious. They wear down your joints slowly from forcing you to push at the wrong angle, or along the wrong path. They corrupt your natural motion, giving you the illusion of safety while your bones quietly grind their way to chronic knee, shoulder and elbow injuries.

How to Fix it

Gym should be certified the same way personal trainers are. Certification should consist of a review by a three person panel composed of an expert in biomechanics, a chiropractor and a physiotherapist. The panelists should review the gym one piece of equipment at a time, and make a set of recommendations regarding machines that must be removed and any warning signs that should be added to those that remain. While we’re at it, any nutritional programs should be reviewed by a qualified nutritionist. At this point, gyms will not comply with reasonable sets of recommendations without some kind of government intervention, because they’ll balk at tossing thousands of dollars of equipment. And lest you have any compassion for these amoral businesses, remember that they never should have bought this stuff in the first place, and their lucky it’s thousands in machinery instead of millions in class action law suits.

Conclusion

Gyms are like cable news. Cable news should report stories that are important, but, under pressure for higher ratings and greater profitability, they show what is entertaining instead. Similarly, gyms should contain the most safe and effective exercising equipment available, and offer honest instruction in using this equipment. However, effective exercises are also difficult. So gyms promote ineffective, “fun” exercises instead.

1. Smith Machine

A smith machine is just a bar built into an apparatus that restricts the bar to a vertical path, and sometimes prevents it from tipping sideways. Smith machines are dangerous because they lock the lifter into a vertical or near-vertical straight-line bar path. The smith machine can be safely used for short range-of-motion exercises such as shrugs and calf raises, where the natural bar path is close to vertical. However, for any compound lift such as a bench press, overhead press, squat or deadlift, the natural bar path is not a straight line. By interfering with your natural (and optimal!) movement, the smith machine increases the stress on your joints and stabilizer muscles. I tore ligaments in both my shoulders using a smith machine for overhead presses.

2. Leg Extension

As you extend your leg into the locked-knee position, your shin bone rotates slightly. Leg extension machines interfere with this rotation. This puts unnecessary stress on the knee joint and can cause the knee cap to grind against the femur. Moreover, the quadriceps evolved to assist in running and jumping movements, not to provide torque against a rotating force.

3. Bent-arm Laterals Machine

Doing dumbbell laterals with your arms straight (but not locked) is reasonably safe and beneficial exercise. However, bending your arms, as this machine forces you to do, dramatically increases the stress on your rotator cuff and can lead to tears. The small muscles and tendons comprising the rotator cuff heal slowly and are difficult to rehabilitate.

4. Cable Row

Rows are a great exercise; however, rowing machines almost always suffer from the same problem. At the beginning of the exercise, you have to reach so far forward to grasp the handles that you inevitably overextend your lower back. This can damage your spine, the nerve cluster in your lower back, and your spinal erectors (the small muscles that hold your lower back straight. These are the sorts of injuries that don’t get better.

Suggestion: use a piece of chain and carabiners to bring the handles closer to you, or get someone to pull down on the cable so you can get into position safely.

5. “Ergonomic” Benches

The thing about ergonomics is that it has to be personalized to your body. These so-called ergonomic benches make assumptions about your height, weight, proportions, limb length, etc. Unless your body happens to fit these (often restrictive) assumptions, you’re out of luck. I can feel the benches in the above picture interfering with my shoulder movement. They also encourage taller people to move too close to the uprights (thus press to linearly) and encourage shorter people to move too far away from the uprights (thus endangering the shoulder in the initial lift). All of this serves to corrupt one’s pressing motion and endanger the shoulders, elbows and wrists.

6. The Pec Deck

This sort of pec deck puts your shoulders in the inner dislocation position and can tear the shoulder ligaments or the rotator cuff.

7. Ab Twisters

The spine is not meant to twist. Twisting the spine can damage the disks between your vertebrae. The kind of spinal twists they do in Yoga (slow, controlled stretches) are probably ok, but twisting against resistance encourages a faster and more violent movement that’s significantly more dangerous.

8. Ab Crunch Machines

Crunches do stimulate growth in the rectus abdominis (the six-pack); however, the full crunching your abs also full flexes your spinal erectors, putting maximum pressure on your lower back. Over time, this damages the disks in your back. Besides, most people’s abs are invisible not because they’re ill-developed but because their percentage body fat is too high. If you want your abs to show, hit the treadmill, not the crunch machine.

Suggestion: Composite exercises such as squats and pushups work your abs the way they were intended to work – as stabilizers. If you must do an ab-specific exercise, try the plank position.

9. Standing Calf Raise

The calf is a very strong muscle. Working both calves at the same time on a standing calf raise can involve hundreds of pounds in a normal person, and over 1000 lbs. in a very strong person. This kind of weight compresses the spine, breaks blood vessels in the shoulders, and generally puts a lot of strain on joints. Standing calf raise machines often encourage this sort of practice because they often come with signs showing a two-leg movement.

Suggestion: Do calf raises one leg at a time. Hold a dumbbell in one hand and a post to keep you steady in the other.

10. The Decline Bench

The decline bench is a shoulder-wrecker if there ever was one. Pressing on a decline bench puts extreme pressure on the shoulder joint and surrounding stabilizer muscles, meanwhile making it nearly impossible to press the weight in the natural back-toward-your-head arc. The slant of the board encourages the lifter to push from the shoulder instead of the chest, and to let the shoulders ride “up” (toward the head) when they should be rotating “down” and back (toward the feet). The decline bench is just an exercise clusterfuck. It’s biomechanical voodoo. Don’t use it.

Suggestion: If you must work specifically on your lower pecs, try a parallel bar dip. However, avoid an extreme range of motion (dropping past the point where your upper arms are parallel to the ground) or this too will put exaggerated stresses on the shoulder. (Note: never do dips behind your back – these endanger the rotator cuff.)

Conclusion

If you’ve used one of the machines profiled above for years without injury, consider yourself lucky it hasn’t hurt you yet and quit now! Yes, smoking hasn’t killed you yet either, but that doesn’t mean you should keep doing it. I am not a doctor; check with yours before starting a new workout program. Don’t just switch to free weights if you have no idea what you’re doing. Find a good book on weight training (The Insider’s Tell-All Handbook on Weight Training Technique, for example) and read it before you beat yourself up.

Related Posts

BS Forms of Exercise and their Athletic Alternatives
Gain 34 lbs of Muscle in 28 Days – How? Double Leg Amputation?

5. Walking

Unless we’re talking about hiking 40 km with a 20kg backpack over rough terrain, ‘going for a walk’ is not exercise. Walking, not sitting, is the natural state of the human body. You will never get anywhere even approaching ‘good shape’ by just walking. Perhaps, if you are a sedentary, obese, pathological eater, walking to and from work every day may help you lose weight. However, it is important to understand that that does not make walking a serious form of exercise. Everybody should walk several kilometers each day simply as a matter of living.

What you should be doing instead

Running, of course! Running is one of the best exercises available: it’s practically free in most climates; you don’t need any special equipment; it will raise even the most fit athlete’s heart rate; and it works all the muscles in the lower body.

4. Gardening

With the possible exception of muffin-baking, Freedent-toting, cheek-pinching, Becel-loving octogenarians, nobody should consider gardening a form of exercise. This is not to say that gardening (and moreso farming) are not hard work, but hard work is different from exercise. You can work hard your whole life and still not be able to run a kilometer if a pack of rabid paparazzi reporters were hot on your tail. Don’t confuse things that make you tired with things that provide good exercise.

What you should be doing instead

Between the ages of 16 and 60, most people will benefit from moderate resistance training (i.e., weightlifting). Twice a week is plenty, and I have had good results from once-a-week training when that’s all my schedule allowed. But stay away from “circuit training” and any workout that makes extensive use of machines or yoga balls. Take the time to learn how to train with weights effectively. It takes years to master the form of the squat, deadlift, bench press, press, row, chin-up, and so on, but the health benefits of resistance training with correct form are phenomenal – not to mention you look better naked. I once considered writing a book called the “No B.S. Guide to Weight Training” but Stuart McRobert beat me to it.

3. Dance

Professional hip hop, ballet, swing and break dancers sweat buckets because they execute highly athletic movements at extreme speed. Most everyone else sweats when they dance because it’s hot and they’re out of shape. Any activity that’s primarily undertaken while half in the bag is not good exercise.

What you should be doing instead

Gymnastics. As long as you don’t go overboard, gymnastics is one of the best forms of exercise. It develops balance, strength, endurance and cardio. It encompasses a wide variety of activities. The only downside is, you’ll need hands-on training. Of course, if you wanted to get good at dancing, you’d need hands-on training for that too.

2. Thinking

While it is true that sitting and thinking burns more calories than sitting and resting, thinking also makes people hungrier than resting, so they tend to eat more afterwards. Based on this study from Laval University, it’s pretty safe to say that the increase in appetite more than makes up for the increased calorie burn.

What you should be doing instead

Martial arts such as Aikido, Iaito, and Tai Chi require intense focus and concentration to produce exactness of form, while simultaneously developing strength, flexibility, balance, speed and timing.

1. Aerobics

I know I’m going to take heat for this, but it has to be said. Aerobics is bullshit. I know far too many people who have spent years doing step aerobics, dance aerobics, cardio kickboxing, boot-camp aerobics, etc., ad nauseam, and still can’t run a few miles or lift their own body weight. In contrast, good luck finding a marathon runner who can’t survive an hour of aerobics. The sheer number of people who are in terrible shape despite excelling at aerobics proves that aerobics is an ineffective exercise.

What you should be doing instead

I cannot overstate the benefits of swimming. It may be the best possible exercise. Swimming builds muscle across the whole body, provides excellent cardio, can save your life, is available all year in ubiquitous indoor pools, and has virtually no impact on your joints. And when you’re done burning 1000 calories in a one-hour workout, you can point and laugh at those featherbrained peacocks spasming in their aerobics class.

Conclusion

I am not a doctor. Check with yours before you start any kind of fitness program, especially if you’re seriously out of shape. Not all forms of exercise are appropriate for all people, but some form of exercise is appropriate for you.

To summarize their arguments, the BMI is a 200-year-old mathematical hack, created by a man who wasn’t even versed in the anatomical sciences of the day, let alone what we know now. It is not a meaningful measure of fitness, obesity or anything else, and is only still in use because it sounds scientific (because there’s a formula), it’s easy to calculate and it makes it easier for insurance companies to charge fit people as if they are obese.

I agree with all of these arguments except the last one. Devlin is hinting that obesity rates in the U.S. are overestimated because of BMI’s misclassification of heavy-but-fit people. This is likely true. However, body weight is not a good indicator of overall health, in the sense that, while being obese likely indicates poor health, not being obese does not indicate good health. This deserves repeating.

Having a normal body weight does not mean you are physically fit.

There are plenty of skinny people who are unhealthy because they have a high body fat percentage, no muscle tone and terrible cardio. So when BMI is used as a general indicator of health, misclassifying fit/heavy people as obese will be mirrored by misclassifying thin/unfit people as healthy. I don’t have any numbers on the extent of these two types of errors, so it’s hard to say which is more prevalent.

Regardless, the basic point holds: BMI is bullshit. Ignore any “science” based on it. Complain to any journalist who uses it.

The purpose of the healthcare system is to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and, if they do get sick, to make them better as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

The purpose of business is to make money.

There is no money in keeping people from getting sick, and curing the sick ASAP.

The way to make money through healthcare is to get people sick as soon as possible and keep them sick as long as possible, meanwhile draining them dry of funds for the “treatments.”

The healthcare system is fundamentally incompatible with profit motives. We must abandon private healthcare thinking as quickly as possible.

Update (25Jul2009): See Bill Maher’s piece in the Huffington Post, New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit. FTA: “If conservatives get to call universal health care “socialized medicine,” I get to call private health care “soulless vampires making money off human pain.” The problem with President Obama’s health care plan isn’t socialism, it’s capitalism.”

What follows these two fateful lines is inevitably an enumeration of common pastimes, most of which aren’t really fun at all. We just keep doing them because we want to get out of the house, and we don’t know what else to do. We are creatures of habit. Here are five habits, more specifically pastimes, that honestly suck.

5. Fast food Restaurants

Weight gain, heart attacks, bad food, uncomfortable chairs, unfavorable lighting, bad service, noise, being surrounded by obese rednecks. I rest my case.

4. Casinos

If you had any real expectation of making money, the casino would be out of business. Gambling is not fun, in any meaningful sense. It is a family-decimating, soul-destroying affliction on humanity. (Qualification: This applies more to pure games of chance, like slots, than to games that require skill, like poker). And the best part is when the degenerate gambler staggers home at dawn, still half-in-the-bag and out one paycheck, and yells at his kid for playing video games all night.

3. Bowling

How is this supposed to be fun? Have you SEEN The Big Labowski? Why bowling alleys attract scum and lowlives I don’t know. And I don’t care! Because whipping a round rock down some hardwood to knock over little white targets that don’t have the common decency to shatter, catch fire, explode, or even STAY DOWN, for the sheer enjoyment of spraining your wrist, is a stupid fucking past time! And don’t get me started on the bad food, bad drinks, nasty-ass shoes and wanna-be-pro assholes who think you have no right to be there because you didn’t your youth playing with someone else’s balls like they did.

2. Movies in Theaters

Yeah, I like movies. And yeah, I used to like going to theaters when I was a kid. But now? With people constantly talking, opening their “cell phones” (a.k.a. flashlights) to check or send text messages and pointing laser pointers at the screens, with the crappy, calorific, overpriced food, with hearing-damage-inducing volume, with picture and sound quality no better than what you can get at home with a Blu-ray player and a surround-sound rig… what the hell is the point of going to the theater? And then there’s the tedium of ads and previews before I can even see what I came for, despite my paying two or three times the cost of a rental to see it (more if you consider that one rental can be spread across the 6 – 10 friends that can comfortably watch a movie in a typical den.) You know why everything online is ad-supported? Because it’s FREE, that’s why. If I plunk down $20 for a ticket and a snack, I expert them to get on with the fucking show already!

Seriously. The only reason left to go to movie theaters is when you’re going on a date and lack any intelligent thing to say, so you have to hide the emptiness of your head by going somewhere you’re not supposed to talk.

1. Dance Clubs

Speaking of concealing the emptiness in your head, there’s going clubbing! With jailbait, risk of getting your drink spiked with drugs, date rape, getting drinks spilled on you, being felt up by cougars, more hearing damage, and a complete nullifying of conversation, what the hell is the point of this? If I wanted to ogle half-naked, objectified women, I’d watch porn. That’s what it’s for. And then there’s the douchebags on the prowl for some half-drunk bimbo to hook up with. We all gotta go sometime, but I’ll take a heart attack over syphilis, thank you very much. Oh, and lots not forget the brainless twats who think a dance club is a great place to meet Mr. or Mrs. Right. What the fuck are these people on? First, it’s too loud to talk to anyone, so it’s impossible to judge whether you’re talking to the Poet Laureate or Larry the Cable Guy. Second, it’s too dark to see anyone, so you don’t know if you’ve got Jessica Alba or Courtney Love. And to top it all off, you’ve been drinking!

If you want to dance, take lessons and be awesome. Otherwise, save it for weddings.

Honorable Mention: Watching the Oscars

For fucksake, what is wrong with the Academy? Did they even watch the movies before they voted? I booed vigorously every time the Curious Case of Benjamin Boredom won something. The gave best picture to a movie embroiled in legal controversy because it nabbed half its cast from the slums in India and then LEFT THEM THERE after the movie became an international hit. A bunch of kids! Oh, what I’d give to go Krampus on their asses!

At some point, the hollywood elites lost site of the purpose of movies: to entertain. You know what was an entertaining movie this year? Iron Man. You know what is not entertaining? Watching a midget-sized prune man transform into an average-sized douchebag over the course of two and a half hours.

Well, big surprise, conservatives are once again full of shit. The American work ethic is the worst thing to ever happen to the health and wellness of children in our country. This idiotic idea that employers should be able to pay their employees basically whatever they want, and it’s an employee’s responsibility to either work enough hours at that job or take on another source of income just to feed their kids has got to die for us to solve any of the real social issues we face as a nation.

Isn’t it interesting that the Republican party – the same politicians who tout family values – are the same people spouting the notion that people should work harder? And this in the country where we already work more hours a day than the rest of the world! It’s hard to raise your children when you never see them. I am often told that problems with crime, problems in education, and problems with drug abuse all start in the home; maybe parents would have an easier time dealing with these problems their children face if they actually saw them once in a while – and I mean more than the hour of homework they might do with them before the kids have to go to bed.

But equally important is the question why should we work that much? You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who enjoys their job more than I do, but even I am more than ready to go home and see my loved ones when the clock hits 6 o’clock. There is currently 7.6 percent unemployment in our country. Hey, you know how maybe we could give those people jobs so they aren’t just collecting the government checks Republicans despise so much? If the people with jobs weren’t working so goddamn much!

According to a New Yorker study:

Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

Alright, but they aren’t as productive as we are, right?

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe.

See? We make more money! But…

In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

You want to know what changed? Europeans realized that there is something more important than GDP. There is something more important than having the largest economy in the world, or the most powerful military. Your family and your life. Work should not be your life, and any society that thinks it’s all right for a person to put in 80 hours a week to feed their kids should seriously re-evaluate their priorities. I like my job, but I damn sure enjoy my weekend too. If you don’t, you’re as psychotic as Republicans.

Suppose you have a sore shoulder – nothing special, just a vague pain in your shoulder. If you go to a GP, you’ll probably be told to rest it for a couple of months (the ignore it and hope it goes away approach). If that doesn’t work, the doc may offer you a cortisone shot. This is a direct result of the doctor’s training: joint pain = inflammation; cortisone is a good drug for fighting inflammation.

Suppose you don’t want to get a shot, so you go to a physiotherapist. The physio ices your shoulder, puts an ultrasound on it, and then uses electrical stimulation to strengthen the muscles around it. He may give you exercises to do with bands or weights. If that doesn’t work, suppose you go to a chiropractor. The chiro will look at your spine and its relationship to your shoulders, tell you your spine isn’t straight, and adjust it. If that fails too, and you go to a massage therapist, the RMT will inspect the muscles surrounding the shoulder, find that they are too tight and compressed, and try to work out the knots.

The problem is that none of these “medical professionals” have a clue why your shoulder hurts. Instead, they look for things the kind of bodily imperfections they have been trained to treat. You may, in fact, have inflammation in the shoulder joint, weak muscles around it, tight muscles compensating for the weak muscles AND a crooked spine. However, none of these quacks knows what combination of these things, if any, is causing the pain. All they do is look for things they can fix, and assume that what they can fix must be causing the problem.

Ideally, the first person you visit should be the GP. Your GP should identify the cause of the problem and refer you to the appropriate treatment; e.g., if it’s tight muscles, go to an RMT. This, however, reveals the fundamental weakness of medical education: GPs are primarily trained to treat viral and bacterial pathology using drugs. Many of them simply cannot diagnose biomechanical ailments effectively. They don’t know who to send you to.

This problem is and will likely continue to become more pronounced in the next decade. As we continue to encourage people to become more active – to run, to lift weights, to play sports, to hike, to bike to work, to swim – people become less susceptible to heart disease, cancer and bacterial illnesses at the cost of increased minor biomechanical ailments. The occasional torn tendon, trained ligament or sore muscle is the price of protecting ourselves from the obesity and muscular atrophy that threatens our lives overall. Healing these minor biomechanical ailments is an integral part of caring for the populace and making exercise more pleasurable and sustainable.

The increasing importance of treating biomechnical injury, therefore, makes improvements in the training of GPs imperative for a healthy society.

In case you haven’t heard, Olympic swimmer and possible comic book mutant Michael Phelps recently lost his Kellogg’s endorsement and fired up a whole shit-storm of pointless controversy because of a picture taken at a college party showing Phelps hitting a bong like the lost third member in a Cheech and Chong trio. Hey, makes sense, right? Such a health-conscious company as Kellogg’s can’t be seen promoting some sickly stoner – that won’t sell Special K to healthy moms, will it?

Just look at these drugged out losers. Hey, the 60s are over, hippies!

Well, no, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. It’s completely retarded, in fact. Let’s not even get into the debatability of all the supposedly terrible effects of marijuana, or the fact that it’s probably not that terrible for you if Michael Phelps – the same guy who won eight fucking gold medals, folks! – likes to smoke it at parties.

You know what is really bad for you, though? Sugar. It’s pretty terrible for you when you eat it in the amounts we do in America, and can lead to all sorts of health problems: obesity, diabetes, heart problems, just to name a few. And hey, you know who one of the biggest dealers of sugar is? Ding ding ding, you guessed it! Diabetes is gr-r-reat!

You know what the second ingredient listed in Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes is? Sugar. The fourth ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. Mmm, sounds like a fine company to look down their nose on those gross, unhealthy, medal-winning potheads.

Speaking of syrup, here’s another wonderful Kellogg’s product:

The breakfast of champions: syrup and sugar-patties. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean waffles.

This is also the same company that produces a host of cookies, sugary snacks, and of course, the staple of every successful athlete’s diet: chocolate banana split Pop-Tarts.

Now, am I saying that marijuana is totally healthy? Of course not – you’re inhaling smoke. But considering obesity is one of the biggest killers in America, while marijuana trails behind at position… wait, marijuana isn’t even on the list? Well, shit. But, hey, lung cancer is on there! Maybe Kellogg’s is on to something after all.

You know what makes this whole situation even worse? Phelps has issued several public apologies for his “regrettable actions.” That’s bullshit, Phelps – you’re a goddamn Marvel mutant, why are you being a bitch? It’s none of Kellogg’s business whether an athlete they endorse smokes pot – once again, if it was that damn bad for you, he wouldn’t have won eight medals. Or is it the criminality that is an issue? If so, wait for him to be convicted of something (hint: he won’t be).

Phelps has nothing to apologize for. In fact, Mr. Phelps, I’ve got a suggestion for your next scandalous picture when you’re hanging out with all your stoner buddies. Why not get a nice close-up of you taking a dump on a box of those chocolate banana split Pop-Tarts? If you need a little help with that, I hear Special K is just loaded with fiber.