Conventional Gym Observations: Exercise Is Not the Same as Fitness

It is rare these days that I work out outside the context of a CrossFit gym, but when I do, it is always a stark reminder of how ridiculous the fitness industry is and what a waste of time most of what people refer to as "exercise" is.

Making Do With a Cruise Ship Gym

Some cruise ships have decent gyms. The Grand Princess is not one of them.

Relatively small, it has plenty of cardio machines but otherwise offers little. The weight machines it has are not the ones you would wish for. There is a small area with a functional trainer cable tower, pull-up handles, and dumbbells that go all the way up to 70 pounds.

Unfortunately, the ceiling is too low to do pull-ups or overhead work.

No thrusters, no clean and jerks, no dumbbell snatches, no dumbbell swings. Ceiling height was a real limiting factor.

I tried some partial pull-ups, dumbbell pullovers, and partial Turkish get-ups to a half-kneeling position to avoid putting my dumbbell through the ceiling, but this was not much of a workout.

Instead, I spent most of my time in the open floor space of the stretching/aerobic area.

Bear crawls, leopard crawls, lizard crawls, crab walks, and monkey crawls, combined with some elevated rocks, sit-throughs, rolling, and various get-ups, served as my main exercises.

I also discovered nylon loops in the ceiling intended as anchors for TRX straps. After testing them, I found them strong enough to handle my body weight. This provided a great pull-up option, as the extra-wide grip offered more range of motion without hitting my head. I could also use them to perform hanging knee raises and L-raises.

Sure, folks looked at me funny, but at least I was getting a decent workout, which is more than I can say for most of them.

Good Intentions, Poor Results

These people must be forgiven. They don't know any better.

They honestly are doing the best they can with the information they have. It is, however, hard to watch so many people, with such good intentions, waste so much time producing such poor results.

Somewhere along the way, a certified personal trainer who knows nothing more about fitness than what they needed to memorize to complete their online test has told them that this is how to get fit.

And these poor folks, diligent enough to attend the gym every day while on vacation, have been putting in the hours without any appreciable results.

No wonder they believe that physical decline is an inevitable result of aging.

Despite their best efforts and discipline, their bodies and health are deteriorating, their fitness eroding, and they don't even realize it is because of, not in spite of, the ridiculous moves that they call exercise.

This is what frustrates me most.

These are people who care about their health. They are willing to put in the work. Many of them are probably hoping to maintain their strength, mobility, and independence as they get older.

But effort alone does not produce fitness. What you do with that effort matters.

When Exercise Becomes a Performance

One young "strong" guy fled the dumbbells, abandoning his 35-pound bicep curls, when tiny Sunghee stepped up beside him and started snatching 30-pound dumbbells. (She is short enough to do that without hitting the ceiling.)

It's embarrassing how watered-down conventional fitness training is.

Women cycling while flexing with four-pound weights as if that is supposed to do something for them.

The most egregious example was an old man performing 15-pound quarter bicep curls.

Seriously, what even is the point of a bicep curl?

Look, I get it. If you want big guns and are too lazy or weak to earn arms with pull-ups and chin-ups, heavy bicep curls might be your go-to. But 15-pounders will not get you there.

Also, this guy was in his 70s and emaciated, with no muscle tone. I don't think he was doing curls for the pump.

I suspect someone once told him that this is what exercise is supposed to look like.

Oh, and the quarter range of motion? He was moving those dumbbells no more than a few inches per rep. I'm not sure where he got the idea that was how to perform a curl.

Anyway, that was his workout.

He came in, did a few reps of partial dumbbell curls at 15 pounds, and then left the gym, his workout done.

What even was the point?

The Difference Between Exercise and Fitness

I wanted to shout at the well-intentioned folks crowding the gym, "This is not fitness; you're doing it wrong!"

Instead, I endured their judging looks as they watched me sweating through my crawls, completing my workout in a fraction of the time theirs lasted.

I rarely spent more than 15 minutes in the gym, including warm-up, and always left the sweatiest guy in the place.

It made me furious to see how the fitness industry has fooled these folks and handed them a bad bill of goods.

Too bad our industry has zero accountability. You can't disbar fitness professionals for malpractice.

First it makes me angry, then it makes me sad.

The tragedy is watching all these disciplined folks doing exactly what they were told they should do and getting none of the results they hoped for or were promised.

There is a difference between doing exercise and developing fitness.

Fitness should make you more capable. Stronger. More mobile. Better able to move your own body, lift and carry things, get up off the floor, climb stairs, and meet the physical demands of everyday life.

This is especially important as we age.

If we want to extend not just our lifespan but our health span—the years we spend healthy, capable, and independent—our training needs to produce meaningful physical adaptations.

That requires more than simply showing up and going through the motions.

It requires effective programming, appropriate intensity, progressive challenges, and, ideally, knowledgeable coaching.

Why CrossFit Changed My Understanding of Fitness

As long as I've been aware of the CrossFit methodology and its incomparable effectiveness, it is easy for me to forget that this is not universally known.

That, in fact, most ordinary folks, and even many "industry experts," lack the understanding to differentiate between effective and ineffective fitness programming.

So often I make the mistake of thinking that folks know the difference and simply make ridiculous choices.

Why would someone choose F45 over CrossFit?

Well, because compared to what most folks are doing in the gym, F45 is infinitely better.

CrossFit changed the way I think about fitness because it gave me a framework for understanding what fitness actually is and how to develop it.

Rather than training muscles in isolation or simply accumulating minutes of exercise, CrossFit emphasizes functional movements, performed at appropriate intensity, across a broad range of physical challenges.

Strength, endurance, power, coordination, balance, agility, mobility—these are capacities that matter outside the gym.

And they matter at every age.

The goal isn't simply to look like someone who works out. It is to develop a body that can do things.

That is the kind of fitness we work to build at Empower Every Body Fitness in Vancouver. Whether someone is new to exercise, returning after years away, or looking to maintain their strength and independence well into their 70s and beyond, the principle remains the same: training should make life better outside the gym.

The Tragedy of Wasted Effort

All these years after Greg Glassman transformed our industry for the better, there remains a profound amount of ignorance surrounding what constitutes fitness and how to produce it.

For most people, it remains an elusive mystery.

I'm not saying that no one outside of CrossFit is getting fit.

But no one in the gym on that cruise ship was.

Most of what people consider exercise is a waste of time, health, and money.

And that is a tragedy, because two of those things you can never get back once they are gone. :(