This Is Why You Don't Go to the Gym

i can imagine that some online services are doing the same thing, or at least hoping for the same effect: users who pay a subscription fee but don't use it. of course, when they do, if they didn't expect it and can't afford to scale they go under.

anyone know how big the parallels are between the economic models used by gyms and many online services?

A little more than a year ago I found a way to get paid to get in shape when I started refereeing soccer. Indeed, the more fit I become, the higher the level of game to which I am likely to be assigned, and consequentially, the more I am paid...it's a fitness hack for someone who doesn't like to exercise, but can buy into the idea of training.

I workout from home, I started a couple of months ago with cardio to loose some fat, and now I'm starting p90x.

The reason I don't go to the gym isn't because I gave up, it's just I don't like that "all" gym environment, plus the fact that I have to drive there, wait for people to let me use a specific machine etc...

with the money I'd spent on a gym, I'm building my own little private gym.

I can't recommend enough for all of us geeks to workout. I used to drink sugar drinks, eat fat food, all that crap. Even though I wasn't fat I was starting to gain weight and man, I was embarrassed of how out of shape I was.

Look it as hacking your own body ;) make it better, each week you will se improvements, get in shape. Just because we are geeks doesn't mean we can't have a great body for ladies ;P

Well right now I don't go because the parking lot has been completely full the past 2 weeks. But I expect that will resolve itself soon :)

One of the articles the author links to is a lot more helpful and concrete [1]. The meat of it:

"Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.

But you can’t spend the first 15 minutes watching CNN from the treadmill and the last 15 “warming down.” Every second has to count, and it all starts with understanding the four basic muscular aptitudes: strength, power, muscle mass, and muscular endurance. [...]

The whole trick to athletic training — and this is true for everybody from bodybuilders to marathoners to noncompetitive athletes just in it for health, or even vanity — is timing each subsequent workout so it hits the middle of that so-called supercompensation peak, when a muscle has already bounced back even stronger than before but hasn’t yet returned to baseline. [...]

It can be hard to believe a true strength coach the first time he tells you that by pressing and dead-lifting on even days, squatting and doing chin-ups on odd days, avoiding all other exercises, and adding a little to the bar each time, you’ll be stronger than you’ve ever been in only a month’s time. Thanks to the fitness industry, we’re so conditioned to equate sophistication with complexity — and to think we’ve got to “work each body part” — that our gut just says, No way; that can’t work. But it works like magic, and the entire body hardens up in unison.

Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week."

[1] http://www.mensjournal.com/everything-you-know-about-fitness...