Sitting Is Killing Your Members

Your clients live a sedentary lifestyle, even your most active members are less active than the average person was 100 years ago. It's a result of modernization. We are a society of sitters. In fact, it has recently been said that sitting is going to be the health crisis of this generation and is as detrimental to our health as smoking.

All this sitting each day leads to poor posture and muscular imbalances, which leads to pain and injuries, and extremely deconditioned individuals. Our society has now developed what is know as the "sitters posture" - rounded, hunched shoulders, tight pecs, weak backs, tight hamstrings, weak core, and weak glutes. Or the reverse Darwin as shown below.

Even if you go back 10-15 years ago, we were more active than today. Take the average desk job. Fifteen years ago if you needed a file you had to get up from your desk, walk to the end of the hall retrieve the file, walk back to you desk, and then return the file. This was repeated over and over all day. Today, with file sharing and the cloud you never have to move from your desk.

Even travel has changed. Recently, I was in the Cleveland Airport. It used to be that you had to park your car, carry your bag, and walk to ticketing and then your terminal. Not in Cleveland, you park you car, walk maybe 50 feet (100 if you didn't get a good spot) and then it's people movers and escalators the rest of the way, with may 100 more steps total taken between people movers. Now, you do have the faster option of walking, but hardly anybody does this.

Those are just two examples of decreased activity and may seem like small stuff, but it has drastically cut our daily activity down, which is why we are required us to train our members differently in our gyms.

We used to be able to get away with using machines to train our members and it worked. Not because the machines were good, but because the client was more active and by adding some strength training it was enough to stimulate the metabolism and get them results. Today however, the only movement most people get is in the gym. So sitting them down on a machine to push and pull weight is no longer effective. They are already expert sitters and more sitting, even if they are lifting isn't enough to stimulate their metabolism and improve posture. We need to get them on their feet and moving. Focusing on total body exercises like the KB Swing, Turkish Get Up, and Farmers Walks will do more to improve their fitness level, posture, and provide more metabolic stimulation than anything done on a machine.