Albert Camus once said that “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” That’s pretty good, but Robb Wolf took that sentiment and mixed it into one more fitting for our current health crisis by saying “the only way to deal with an unhealthy world is to become so absolutely healthy that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” As an armchair rebel and habitual line-stepper, I like both. As a Health & Performance coach, I’m partial to Robb’s take as it fits my narrative on prioritizing health above all else. 

The idea of improving health is, and ALWAYS will be an active process. Yet the way this crisis is being handled has left me with no patience, like an out of work doctor. Simply distancing yourself by sitting in your house while Taco Bell gets delivered by DoorDash is not in any way a pursuit towards improving health outcomes because you decided to wear a mask when you answer the door. We are trying to solve the wrong problem. If we’re so worried about the transmission of poor health, why is it legal for someone right next to me to light up a cigarette and blow it in my face. 

Personally, I thought this whole ordeal would be a wake up call for health challenged people. I’ve had clients too afraid to leave their house because they might contract the RONA, yet they’re at home in their jammies taking peanut butter shots to the head, thinking they’re going to be safe because they wash their hands and wear a mask. The main problem is still being missed. 

Let me lay it out. HEALTH IS CUMULATIVE. It is affected by everything you do — from the way you think, what you put in, on or around your body, and even the environment you find yourself in. Dr. Terry Walhs said it best; “Your genes load the gun, and the environment pulls the trigger.” Meaning you are born healthy (most likely) and you have the power to keep it or destroy it by the choices you make. Whether by food, or alcohol, or poor sleep, or stress, or toxic burdens, or a combination of all.

You would think that because everything we do affects our health, something like a gym would be an essential business. NOPE. People are going to jail for trying to improve themselves….

So you see, it is an act of rebellion to be healthy these days. Take Atilis Gym in New Jersey. In May, they decided to defy the government mandated shutdown and open their doors to the public who wished to get their workouts on. Obviously, Big Brother, doesn’t like blatant acts of defiance so the owners were given citations for every day they remained open until their eventual arrest yesterday. In the interim (between May and the arrest) to deter this rebellious activity, the government went so far as to try to shut the power off to the building, but that didn’t work because the gym owners paid 3 months in advance. Next, the authorities had the plumbing to the gym turned off, which caused the place to flood. The gym closed for a day of clean up and was opened up the next. The following attempt to stop the gainztrain was to hire a locksmith to come in the middle of the night to change the locks on the door. The gym owners found a solution by TAKING THE DOORS OFF the building and making it a 24 hour fitness facility. More gym access is better for everyone right? WRONG! The owners were arrested shortly after this on the ground that they were not operating their business within the proper guidelines for COVID-19 safety. 

It is arguable that they were practicing outside of the guidelines, so there may be precedence. In the two months they fought to be open, they limited the amount of people in the gym at any given time, ask for distancing within the facility, had everyone to clean up after themselves, and DIDN’T REQUIRE MASKS. The funny part was that NO ONE contracted the virus who attended the gym. While their methods were contradictory to what the CDC has been telling everyone, what they did seems to have worked. Maybe the government doesn’t know everything.

As anyone in the Iron Game knows, if you’re waiting for the research you’re behind the curve. It can take as long as 30 years in some cases for certain techniques discovered in the basement of the dirtiest gym to come out in research papers. That aside, we should all have the freedom to choose whether or not we put ourselves at risk. It seems crazy to think that liquor stores, marijuana depots, gun stores, Mc-FUCKING-Donalds are considered ESSENTIAL, yet the once place where you can go to actually improve your health is closed. 

Our health has become an act of rebellion, but should it be?

Like many countries, Norway ordered all gyms to close in March to prevent the spread of the RONA. But unlike every other nation Norway decided to use their free time effectively and not binge on Netflix and Quarantini’s. Norway funded a study to determine whether the closings of gym were really necessary. 

The study was a 2 week randomized trial of almost 4000 participants — half had access to the gym, the other half did not. Ages ranged from 18-64, and all were stated to not have any underlying health conditions. Those who were invited back into the gym were met with enhanced safety measures that required hand washing prior to entrance, a minimum distance of 3 feet of separation when doing floor exercises, 6 feet within higher intensity classes like Spin, and NO ONE WAS REQUIRED TO WEAR A MASK. You may think there is going to be an apocryphal ending here, but no. There was no difference in transmission rates between groups. In fact, only one person contracted the virus during the whole study, and he got it from his workplace. 

The take away here is that the risk of transmission does not seem to be increased by going to the gym. I guess the argument to this is that most gym goers are relatively more concerned with their health, thus healthier overall. However, isn’t that the point!? Also, comparatively, the obesity rate for Norway vs. the U.S. is 3% to HEAFTY 30%. So again, that may play a part in it all, which just harkens back to my soapbox rantings of the past.  Anyway, all this begs the questions, why not let people go to the gym? The risk of infection in the community is seemingly so low that the benefits are outweighed by the advantages. We can’t stay locked down forever. And we are going to be in this for a long while, so why don’t we stop making health so fucking hard to accomplish. 

Link to study — https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138768v2