The Fitness Machines with heavy Engineering.

It makes you lose weight just looking at them. If you thought those exercise machines of a few years ago had reached their awesome limits, look again. I walked past a sport shop late yesterday afternoon and promptly lost three kilos. There they were, all lined up behind the window; ready to mangle you into a skinny frame. They are massive. Breathtakingly ambitious in teaching you a bitter lesson in fitness. You wonder how they would even fit inside a normal home. Mind you, the rotund (obese) probably live in those large homes specially built for people bigness and slimming equipment.

A few years ago, the fitness machines could be folded and put under the bed.  Now, of course, any home worth living in has to have a gymnasium together with blocks and tackles to hoist thighs and stomachs onto the equipment. A while back I wrote how those exercise machines could be put to use for electricity generation. I am sure that the combination of slimming down to a more lithe form and making electricity could easily be an election winning strategy for any party.  I can see a combination of Mirabella and a tubby Scott Morrison tied to an endless treadmill very easily.

No, the slimming industry has gone into larger designs as never before. The psychology of slimming and fitness dictated the industry into a complete overhaul and re-think, hence the bulldozer look like slimming equipment of today. The move for fitness and slimness has to be for equipment to be so intimidating, so large and devastatingly serious, that it reduces the participant into slimming by just looking at them. Is it the comparison of the size of those giant machines next to the purchaser that makes anyone look smaller and slimmer? I saw an exercise bike with a fly-wheel so big; it resembled something out of a Hunter Valley coal powered generator. A clever ploy! The bigger the machine, the smaller one looks.

There is perhaps a bit of glibness even a mere hint of hypocrisy in my attention to weight and fitness. If the ingestion of lamb and pork chops including spare ribs year after year are anything to go by, in my case they kept me slim and taut. Not for me the Roly Poly of anything being overweight. So I guess, weight might well be a combination of genes and lifestyle, especially considering that looking at old photos we were so much thinner even though the diets of yesteryear with mutton and fatty foods was hardly any more healthier. We did go around the streets a lot more, Billy carts and all.

One thing got me perplexed. What do people look at when on one of those giant machines, treading away hour after hour? Assuming it is set up in the bedroom or even a gym, it is hard not to assume the exerciser is looking at a wall or perhaps a piece of furniture, may be a bed or kitchen cupboard. Perhaps some might put up a picture of Mount Everest or The Matterhorn and imagining they are climbing it, eventually it must get terribly boring.

This is why I ask myself; why the hell don’t they go out and do the treading on the street, on the footpath with an ever changing landscape as one puts feet after feet forward.

What has happened to walking?