I've Tasted... Celebrity Bliss!

I had a taste of high-class living. No, not in a posh restaurant. At a fitness center. They call it Celebrity Fitness. Rightly so! I came out, feeling like a celebrity.

From the moment I stepped in, I knew I was in upper-class society. You don’t see your Ah Bengs, Ah Chongs, Muthus, or Ramlis there. You’ll see only Roberts, Andrews, Kingstons, and Vincents.

Exercise, as I know it, is something that requires discipline. It’s something that you don’t want to do, but you do it because you know it’s good for you. At fitness centers, I think the concept of exercise is turned around. Exercise becomes a luxurious practice. More like a privilege, rather than an act of self-discipline. Let me show you why.

At a fitness center, you get to use state-of-the-art equipment. The technology involved allows you to work and tone every single muscle imaginable in your body. While doing that, you get to watch televisions, hear upbeat music in the background, and enjoy an air-conditioned environment. There will be staff around, and fitness trainers too. Well-built, friendly and professional, they lend their assistance at your beck and call. They have special classes going on around the clock. Different exercise programs, with all kinds of fancy names. They look so interesting, the people doing it look more like they’re having fun!

Now, compare that to the old-school way of achieving cardiovascular fitness, e.g. going for a jog. You got to choose a good time to go for a jog. Hope that the weather’s not raining. If you miss a good time, then you’ll either be running in the scorching sun, or running in the dark.

Forget about timing if you’re going to a fitness center. You can go there anytime you like. You’ve got a roof over your head and an excellent, controlled environment for you to work out.

When you go for a run, you don’t leave the house without your sunshades. You make sure you have just enough water in your system before you go. Not too little, to avoid dehydration. Not too much, because you don’t want to heave water all over your tummy as you run.

Forget about all that when you go to a fitness center. The treadmills face a glass wall with a sea view. You can drink water any time you like at the water dispensers. And the water is cool!

Now, when run in the streets you need to have a lot of discipline and determination. You got to find ways to motivate yourself to go the distance, or find ways to distract yourself from feeling tired. If you don’t have an MP3 player to blast fight music in your ears, you kinda have to remember the tune in your head and replay it in your mind. You don’t have much visual motivation too. The most you can see are buses or speeding motorbikes dashing past you. The best eye-candy you can get is seeing Indons and Banglas walking back from work.

If you go to a fitness center, you have specially programmed fight music to motivate you throughout your exercise program. From the warm-up, to the main course, to the warm down, you have music that creates just the right mood. You have a trainer in front of you who motivates you and encourages you all the time. When you glance around, you can see well-toned bodies, dressed in really cool exercise outfits too! How’s that for visual motivation?

After a run in the road, you’ll feel all hot and grimy. You’ll want to pull off your shirt and walk around a while, hoping that a cool breeze will blow. After you’re done “cooling off”, you’ll have to drive home for another 20 minutes before you finally get a nice bath.

If you’re at a fitness center, you can head to the sauna after your workout! Man, the sauna does wonders to you to “clean you off”. After that, you can hit the showers. The bathrooms are so clean, you feel like you’re in a hotel. You don’t really need to bring anything with you except a spare change of clothes. They’ll give you towels, shampoo, soap... Heck, even their soap feels special! After a sauna and bath, you’ll feel exceptionally clean!

When I came home, I felt so good! So good, as if something isn’t quite right. What is it, exactly?

I think I’ve experienced a drastic change in the concept of exercise. The way I see it, I’ve always seen exercise as a form of training. Training to win at competitions, mostly. It is not something you do for fun. But you make yourself do it, because you look forward towards the reward that awaits you at the end of the long, painful tunnel. You’re looking for glory. And that alone, is your only source of motivation as you clean your wounds and let your strained muscles retire for the night.

But at a fitness center, exercise becomes a luxury. It becomes a form of loving yourself. You actually want to go there and do it, because it makes you feel so good! A long, painful tunnel is non-existent. The reward is right there, in the fitness center itself! Instant gratification! And a sauna awaits you every time you go there. Exercise becomes almost hedonistic.

Yes, you'll still get the health benefits. You'll still get the cardiovascular fitness and well-sculpted body that you wanted. But yet, something’s missing. Something that you can get only if you went old-school style. That thing is called: Character building.

I'm not putting down anyone who enjoys going to fitness centers. Hey, I really enjoyed it myself! Advancement in technology, ergonomics, and healthy lifestyles are good to improve the quality of life. But yet, sometimes the missing factor that can add a valuable touch to the quality of life can only be attained old-school. If a luxury is taken away, can you go back to what you used to have? Is the character of a person who sees exercise as a luxury different from the person who sees it as a discipline?

This reminds me very much about the concept of contentment. We enjoy what we have in surplus as a luxury. And we make do with the little that we have. In prudence, we choose to live our lives with what we can do without, knowing that sometimes it may be better to do with less.

“The things we can learn by having less is more than the things we can learn by having much.” – C.S. Hooi

With all of that said…Hey! I have 2 weeks' worth of a free trial period at Celebrity Fitness! I’ll just think about the “character stuff” later... 