I’ve gotta be honest with you. I got a good chuckle when I read this article on MSNBC.com.
Headline: "Gym-goers trip, flip, and fall in pursuit of fitness."
It recounted stories of rather klutzy gym rats who fell of treadmills, rolled off exercise balls, tripped over jump ropes, or dropped weights on their toes.
I don’t mean to laugh at anyone’s misfortune, but you have to admit that the picture of someone breaking his toe because he kicked a treadmill is rather amusing.
But that’s where the humor ends.
The grim reality is that this nonsensical "exercise-is-good-for-you" craze is landing more than 50,000 people in the emergency room every year because of mishaps on gym equipment, according to numbers from the Consumer Products Safety Commission. But that’s just the tip of the exercise iceberg.
At least 17 million Americans are treated for sports-related injuries each year overall, including 3.5 million children under the age of 14. And who knows how many millions more silently limp along with untreated aches and injuries caused by something that was "supposed" to make them healthier.
The experts chalk the injuries up to user error and suggest that people be more careful. It’s user error alright — the error occurred when they thought they needed to exercise to begin with.
This has nothing to do with how careful you are — and everything to do with the high price of self-destructive behavior. Punish your body and you WILL pay the toll.
Can you name one athlete you know — or one exercise nut — who isn’t nursing some sort of injury? If you do, just give it time. They’ll be bandaged up and making weekly visits to the physical therapist soon enough.
Sports can destroy your knees and cause early-onset arthritis, as I told you not long ago. But that’s getting off easy. Recent studies on former football players show their brains are turning into oozing puddles of useless mush from all the hits they take.
That’s not just an occupational hazard for rich, spoiled athletes — but a real risk for any of the millions of kids who play competitive sports in high school or college. Many of these supposedly fit people eventually hobble around on perpetually bandaged limbs like they limped off a Civil War battlefield instead of sports field.
And yet the nutty experts just want to blab on and on about how safe exercise is.
Wake up and smell the Ben-Gay! The safest thing you can do is to stay out of the gym.