Bodybuilding.com Wants To Give You A Lot Of Money.

Each year Bodybuilding.Com sponsors a competition offering the ultimate incentive for you to finally get off your ass and get fit: MONEY.

Visit their website to learn how:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/transform-for-life.html

Winter Dreams Of Summer Fun

Six months ago were you thinking about how great you’d look by now if you’d only started working out back then, upping your nutrition and fitness game? Yet here you sit six months later and nothing’s changed because you were too busy or tired or stressed or whatever. There is no perfect time in your future to do this: there is only NOW.

There are lots of enviable before-and-after examples online on YouTube and on fitness blogs and websites of what people accomplished in 90 days when they finally made up their minds to do it (search google images with "men before and after"). Browsing these examples might just get you revved up to finally take that challenge, to change yourself, to turn over a new leaf.

Looking great is a life-altering prize in itself, enhancing your self esteem. Kidding yourself by railing against others’ “unfair” judging you by the way you look overlooks the obvious truth: we are all judged on the way we look, and all the self-righteous nonsense in the world will not change that reality. It just IS.

Looking better than we do presently is within everyone’s power. But feeling great physically and being secure in the knowledge that you are fitter, stronger and healthier by your own efforts has its own unique rewards. Losing your spare tire and building muscle has significant emotional benefits as well, not the least of which is the stress-reduction that comes from working out your excess energy and frustrations through strength training.

Equinox Gym: A Dystopian Nightmare?

This article in GQ about Equinox Gym does a great job of describing the kind of gym and exclusive cliquish membership that might just send shivers up your spine.

The female author revels in and celebrates and promotes this Dystopian gym’s retina scanner in place of a membership card and its social-climbing, vacant, status-seeking preening posers. In the process she disparages all other gyms, claiming Bowflex at-home workouts are “bogus,” and claims that Gold’s Gym members are all steroid users. She also seems repulsed by actual muscle: “Lean is the physical ideal here; company executives actually use the term Equinox body—a toned, androgynous shape designed to glide in and out of $300 Acne jeans and sleep (“regenerate”) on the finest linens.”

Androgynous? Sounds like a nightmare.

My chosen gym is frequented by old people, really obese people, muscular Marines, hard workers, female bodybuilders, and all kinds of others whose main goal at the gym is not schmoozing, networking, or feeling superior to all others.

The article makes for an interesting, albeit creepy, read. You may end the article, as I did, with a new appreciation for your current gym.

HOW TO DEAL WITH TROLLS

Trolls are solitary attention seekers. They are individuals who feel ignored and unheard in real life situations, so as a way of validating themselves they manipulate others via their keyboards. They write things with the sole intent of getting a reaction, and THAT means triumph as far as they’re concerned. To get others involved in their drama is the ultimate validation for them. Nothing feels worse to a troll than being unnoticed.

Your responding to a troll hands them the victory they seek.

Your responding to a troll provides them the attention they desperately crave, which only drives them onward to state even more outrageous things. If no one listens, if no one responds, if their words are rejected as unimportant and irrelevant, the troll will go away. Being ignored is the ultimate indignity for a troll. With no one listening, there will no longer be any motivation to shout. It’s akin to being the sole resident of a ghost town. Any response to a troll provides them with the gratification they so aggressively seek, so the very best way to respond to a troll is not at all.

An online troll, once he makes his outrageous comment, sits back and waits with bated breath for the responses to pour in. How very gratifying to see when no one has taken the bait, no one has responded, to know that this pathetic little person is sitting there waiting, deflated and ignored. But that’s okay — trolls have nothing better to do.