(Newswire.net— May 22, 2018) — There is a saying that if you have a free gym in your building, and you also have an annual membership in a gym, but you don’t use either, you probably live in Dubai.
Actually, paying for 12 months of gym membership and forgetting about it is a common thing for people all over the planet. It’s just not how motivation for weight loss works, NBC’s Better reports.
According to the report, half of Americans fail to fulfill their workout plan. Even if you spent upwards of $700 for the 12 month membership in a gym, the idea to motivate yourself by knowing that you lose money if you don’t go to the fitness center you paid for is proven to be wrong. You simply don’t have time, or you are so tired you couldn’t lift an arm or move a leg.
Unlike businesses like restaurants or clubs who will go bankrupt if people don’t show up, gyms are doing perfectly fine. It is due to the annual membership of people who never show up. According to the Planet fitness chain, one of the cheapest gyms available, more than 50% of people who pay for the whole year just never show up.
There are various reasons why people lose interest in going to the gym but it all comes down to a lack of discipline. Even if we pay it in advance when registering membership for a gym, we are actually projecting ourselves into what we think we should look like but that feeling is short term and gives up under pressure of an everyday routine. It works perfectly well for gyms, though.
Knowing that it is in human behavior not to go to the gyms, fitness centers often sell more than they have capacity to serve, the Planet Money Workout reports. In Episode 590, a reporter visited the Planet fitness gym in Manhattan and discovered that the fitness center sold out 10 times more membership cards than they can actually serve.
“If they [members] all show at the same time, it would be a disaster,” the fitness center clerk told Planet Money.
Going to a gym also doesn’t mean that we would lose weight, according NY Times. Going to a gym is a neat thought, however, hard exercise makes us hungry so we have a tendency to compensate all the calories we burned in a gym with feast afterwards.
Our body functions in a way of preserving a certain level of energy it is used to having, so if there is more energy used, there is a greater need to get it back. So, it is just our biology, the way our organism is made to function.
A routine of exercise is also one of the reasons we are not losing weight as we think we should after a workout in the gym. Researchers found that people who repeat same fitness exercise over and over are burning less calories than those who change their workout routine. It is because our muscles grew stronger and adapt to use less energy for the same stress. Thus, our body burns fewer calories.
So, what should we do to reduce weight?
According to experts, every day walking beats time spent in the gym. Combined with food intake control, you may find that walking is the best way to lose weight and stay fit, experts say.
…and it’s free.