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First it was the pavement that never ends
Please join in me in welcoming the next logical sequence in gym machines, Neatoramanauts: behold Mt. EverClimb, a continuous rope climbing system.
It’s like gym back in high school, but without the jocks laughing at you for falling down on your weakling butt! Link – via NotCot
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Doug Forbis is in a graduate education program and has done some student teaching. He aspires to be a physical education teacher for children with special needs. Forbis believe he can offer encouragement because he’s an athlete -despite having no legs.
“It’s so rare for kids with special needs to have a teacher with special needs — that almost never happens,” he said. “I think it would help a lot for these special need kids to say, ‘Look, Mr. Forbis is a teacher, I can do that, too. He lives by himself, gets around town, goes shopping, I can do that, too.’ A lot of kids don’t know that’s an option. They just depend on the system their whole lives.”
Forbis has participated in swimming, basketball, and track in leagues for disabled people. His professors say he has a talent for talking to children. Link -via Fortean Times
(Image credit: Barcroft/Fame)
Gym-Pact is a company founded by Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer that arranges for group membership rates at fitness clubs in Boston. Customers pay higher rates the more often that they skip workouts, thus encouraging them to keep in shape:
Gym-Pact offers what Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.
Zhang and Oberhofer translated that principle to workout motivation. If missing a workout cost people money, they’d be more motivated to stick with it, they thought.
“If you have a toothache, you go to the dentist. If there’s a cavity, you know it needs to get filled in, but if it doesn’t hurt right now, you may not bother,’’ Mullainathan said. “In traditional gym memberships, not going is not very costly. In this one, you actually might feel the pain of not going immediately.’’
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe
Most people’s New Year’s resolutions usually involve losing weight, but Australian underwear model and personal trainer Paul "PJ" James’s was the exact opposite: he wanted to become fat to better understand his obese gym clients!
Matt Johnston of the Herald Sun has the story:
PJ, 32, has already gone from 80kg to 100kg since making his New Year resolution to boost his flab.
"I have always found it easy to tell clients what to do to lose weight, but it’s hard to tell where a client is coming from and how they are feeling," he said.
"There are health risks, I won’t shy away from that. But I’m trying to do it as responsibly as possible, with regular blood pressure and health checks."
He said his body had tried to reject the fat at first, but he had worked hard to make sure he stacked on the kilos, and was now starting to notice people looking at him differently.
"Especially when I’m trying to train clients and they are doing sit-ups and I’m standing there with a massive gut," he said.
"My gut is pretty big. That’s where most of the weight seems to be going."
Link (Photo: Rebecca Michael) | More pics at Australia-Bodybuilding Blog
