By Doctor Nicola Sacchi - Author of the book: Drugs and doping in sport -
Many people sign up in a fitness center to improve their aesthetic condition, then start practicing different music courses, start using isotonic and cardio-fitness equipment and find themselves after a few months exactly in the condition they were in before starting their path. of renewal. In practice, after a long time invested in the gym, no results are seen or, although all those activities are promoted as "fat burning and toning", the results are far below expectations.
The answer to these questions is hidden behind the very concept of fitness and what it proposes as a tool for physical renewal.
Basically, behind the term fitness is collected the set of various forms of physical activity and not only that are currently carried out in traditional gyms. The mass media and the sports sector use this term to define the set of activities carried out by people to maintain themselves. fit and feel good.
We do fitness to stay in shape, to lose weight, to firm up, to be more beautiful, to be fashionable, to promote social relationships, etc.
For all these reasons, people sign up in the most renowned centers or buy the most advertised machinery, believing in this way to reach their ideal state of form.
Anything that represents fitness can never actually lead to the results it promises, as fitness itself is only a commercial response to a need.
We tend to identify with fitness those physical practices carried out by people with purely health and aesthetic goals, and not physical performance. The first basic error is expressed in this concept: thinking that aesthetic aims are not related to athletic performance, or thinking that health is not related to greater physical efficiency measurable through an improvement in performance. To make a muscle firmer it is necessary to make it stronger since it is the presence of contractile proteins that gives consistency to the tissues and these are produced to a greater extent only if the muscle in question has to move greater loads, therefore if it becomes stronger.
Motor activity, as such, must first of all provide for an improvement in some athletic component. Only by reasoning and acting in this way is it possible to obtain results, even if the goal is purely aesthetic. Fitness, i.e. physical well-being, can only be achieved by improving the body's own abilities. The estrangement of the body from its abilities actually represents the negation of the body itself, so thinking of improving physically and aesthetically without improving its physical abilities is an absolutely impossible goal to achieve. certain physical abilities) is equivalent to denying the very idea of training. Many of the activities and exercises offered in the gym are not structured to condition the body but simply to move while having fun or to move in absolute safety.
Training doesn't have to be fun, it has to be conditioning!
Fitness wants to make physical activity easy and comfortable, the ideal it aspires to is to train in an armchair or maybe on the beach while sunbathing or even sleeping in bed. Aiming for this is decidedly absurd: to bring about results, motor activity must not be easy or comfortable, otherwise it would not be activity in this case as well. Physical conditioning is obtainable only if there is fatigue, which is not compatible with the concept of easy and comfortable.
The fitness market is based on the succession of captivating innovations offered to users with the assumption that new is better. But who has ever proved this? Courses and machinery without any scientific basis are offered, indeed, which often aim to subvert the laws of chemistry and biology: work without effort ??? But how is it possible to produce work without using energy? All this is the negation of the laws of physics: to perform work you need a force.
Isotonic machines that allow you to perform a guided movement in the smallest detail to isolate a muscle do not allow you to train the body; Muscle isolation is another absurd craze that fitness has taken from the distorted and confused world of body building. Basically, isolation exercises are the least effective for conditioning the body, precisely because the body in real life does not move with contractions of single muscles but uses kinetic chains, therefore muscle isolation represents the alienation from the laws of evolutionary biology that - over millennia - he created the living being man who, according to his nature, articulates his movements freely in space. Yet, most of the exercises proposed in the fitness sector aim to concentrate the work on a single muscle, seeking isolation from the rest of the body; the use of these exercises will never lead to any result. Furthermore, everything that a machine performs is something that the body does not do, so driving in a movement involves less effort on the part of the person, consequently a lower chance of obtaining a result.
Let's be clear, fitness is a business that makes a lot of money run and like all profitable markets it is based on the fact that users spend money, this is the goal of the sector and certainly not improve the physical condition, indeed if people put themselves all fit would no longer spend on the purchase of new products and this would be counterproductive for companies in the sector; therefore the products offered by the market must sell only illusions and not concrete results, so that people remain dissatisfied and continue to spend money on the novelties of the moment.
To find a truly effective workout it is therefore necessary to base your efforts on achieving a performance result, so those who want to tone up must train with the goal of becoming stronger; this is the only approach that can lead to real changes in physical fitness. .
