Tuesday, June 16, 2009

THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART: Over the last few years, I've realized that I do have a fundamental credo, a principle around which I order my life and think others should order theirs. It's that the world runs better when everybody gets out of everybody else's way. We've talked about many applications of this principle -- never getting to the front of a line without knowing what you want when you get there; the walk-left-stand-right principle; the inviolable rule that on a freeway a car should always be moving appreciably faster than traffic in the lane immediately to the right. It is with this principle in mind that I announce the worst invention in the history of human health: Fitlinxx.

Fitlinxx is basically a hardware/software combination that tells you what to do in the gym. I'm sure it has competitors, but Fitlinxx is the only one I know. I'm sure it has tremendous benefits -- it probably gives you a workout so well-rounded that I might be willing to overlook the use of an "xx" when a "ks" would do. But I won't, because I want to punch Fitlinxx right in the xxer.

The problem is that in giving you an exercise on a machine, then a timed period of rest, and then another exercise on the machine, Fitlinxx seems to have vested a large group of gymgoers with a belief that they have machine-squatting rights. Normal people do exercises, get up, wander around for a few seconds (letting others use the machines we've vacated), and then sit back down for more torture. Fitlinxx users, to a man, use up their allotted 30 seconds of rest (and usually more) sitting on their machines staring daggers at anybody with the temerity to draw near the Cone of Fitlinxx Sovereignty. If I linger at a machine a nanosecond longer than I need to, some Fitlinxx user is always handy to goose me out of my languor. So why can't Fitlinxx users taking a mandated 30-second break let me in for a 12-rep/12-second set?

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