Save Money, Cancel Your Gym Membership

Your gym membership may just be your local gym’s way of preying on your good intentions to make a buck. Unless you live in outer space, you are subject to the laws of gravity. This means you can use your own body weight to exercise your muscles. For many of us, myself included, it would be nice to have a little less body weight to exercise with! Here are three everyday things you can substitute for the machines at the gym that were built as substitutes for the everyday objects you have around you. Think about that for a moment! Ready? Here we go:

1. Stairs: Your local gym has stairclimbers, stairmasters, and other machines with fake steps. Forget about those machines and find some stairs near you. Chances are you have stairs right in your building. Make a game of adding steps each day. There are 1860 steps from the street level to the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building. When you’re up to running that many steps, the people who use the machines at the gym will wear a path to your door begging to know how you got so fit!
2. Sidewalks, fields, mountain roads, vacant lots, city streets: A few years back, some fitness experts got together and decided to build a machine that would allow people to continue a walking motion without getting anywhere, seeing anything, or meeting anybody. They came up with the treadmill and lonely, boring people have been using them ever since. Take your plain old shoes on your plain old legs and walk yourself out the door. An amazing world of exercise awaits you!
3. Heavy stuff: Do you realize how silly it is to get dressed up and go to a building to lift metal disks and yank on cables attached to more metal disks? Unless you work in a cable-and-disk factory, this shouldn’t be a normal part of your day. We are surrounded by heavy things and when we run out of heavy things to move, we have our own body weight to work with. If you still have energy after cleaning your house and helping your neighbor move, do some push-ups. Feeling really creative? Sit down cross-legged on your kitchen floor then stand back up…50 times. The same drive that would keep you going to the gym can be re-directed into physical activities you don’t have to pay for.

I’m not a doctor or otherwise certified to give out health advice. If you hurt yourself trying to bench press your office furniture, you won’t be able to sue me. However, I do know about saving money in practical ways. If you are serious about saving money, start by cancelling your gym membership.

Tags: health | Saving Money