Health Clubs

I should start out by saying that I'm not a health professional or even a fitness professional. I have no degrees or specific training. I just do a ton of research and experimenting and I like to blog about my ideas and experiences. I should also confess that I'm terrible at going back and adding the links and annotations to the scholarly sources I use. You'd think that a couple decades of college would make it habit but instead its made it loathsome.

Anyway, the topic of today is health clubs. The best form of exercise for anyone is the form they find interesting. That could be playing basketball, or golf, or skiing. Whatever you find entertaining is best, but honestly you need something year-round, that exercises your whole body, and builds strength, agility and endurance. Hopefully you can find something like that you don't hate. I think for writers, the perfect activity is swimming--it's low impact, near perfect resistance, full range of motion and also builds endurance.

Of course, swimming pretty much means a health club unless your living space has one. I have a couple beefs with health clubs. They are expensive, full of thieves, and often germs. I haven't had anything stolen from me in quite awhile, but two of the four years that I had gym memberships were the sickest years of my adult life.

Recently, my wife and I decided to ditch our membership until the end of summer. She had to go in to do it in person, where she learned that the fine print of the contract stated changes must take place 5 or more days before the end of the pay period. We paid first and last, so we have membership through the end of March now. We're NOT happy with that crap.

Anyway, having recently lost 44lbs I'm wanting to continue that trend and maintain it, both. I know it but it seems like if you're still dropping weight you don't have to stress about keeping it off. But I want to make sure I'm covering all bases. I've tried and tried to refind the article I read recently that said 7 out of 8 people who kept weight off worked out at home. So here's some resources.

 Here's an article about keeping the weight off from Health.com.

Here's an article on working out without equipment.