by Drew Rivetty |
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I'm looking at the shelves in my office that are now stocked with medical books with
titles like Excitotoxins, Adrenal Fatigue and Diagnosis and Treatment of the Spine.
My office is littered with muscle and skelton charts, and I have a full-blown gym in my backyard.
This is quite a leap for someone who was once an overweight, beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking commodities broker, a political journalist and a literature major. My life changed when my perspective changed. It started with lifting weights, and then I was blindsided by lifestyle changes I never knew I was capable of. And now you are reading this and wondering what you can get out of regular workout sessions. Who knows, maybe you'll become a doctor someday? This column is aimed at motivating you -- something that I am discovering is very difficult to do. I have my life story and my observations and research. I have my reasons for starting this business and my ambitious intention to help people. The trick is always like finding the combination to a lock and knowing the right things to say that will make your experience with exercise much better.
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I started in this business because I first saw how personal training could be at the forefront of the preventive health industry. Of course, you have already noticed a panic hovering over our country. We fear being first consumed by disease and then sucked into paying endless healthcare bills, becoming a pawn in the pharmacutical industry's game and finally wasting away in hospital waiting rooms. Now, like never before, there is a desperate cry to do something about one's health before it's too late. I can't stress enough about the timing of preventive health surfacing in the mainstream. People are looking for something to connect with. For all the inspiration we've seen from history and today around the world about activism, taking control of your health is the most accessable action you can do. Personal training and preventive health draws from everything that our modern age champions - from art, history, science, pyschology and sports, to name a few.
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I'm certainly not the first to stumble upon the potential of personal training. There's a civil war going on over the soul of the industry -- one side is made up of the corporate mega-gyms working hard to squeeze profit (and the fun) out of training; the opposition is made of the alternative medicine folks, who are less lethal to the industry, but with hokey claims and touchy-feely atmospherics, they continue to lead promising clients into believing they are joining a cult. I'm trying to wrestle personal training away from both groups and reboot it. Think of it as...cycling. I recently read Lance Armstrong's autobiography It's Not About the Bike (hence, the inspiration for the this column's title) and learned how his cycling - and cancer - early on in his career changed his perspective then changed his life for the better. The important thing about training is not the weight you are lifting, nor is it about how many pounds you weigh. The important thing is to enjoy it as much as you enjoyed playing backyard football or playing on the beach with friends. The important thing is to take your mind off of the stats and numbers and automatically hit those results by having fun.
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