exer-shaming? that’s a thing?

i had no idea this was a thing…

…but first, a brief history:

i flunked out of college in 1991. twice. totally true. there was a girl (isn’t there always?), i was more into spending time with her than i was my collegiate endeavors. so, at the end of the spring of 1991 i flunked out. at the time (they might still do this, i just don’t know) if your GPA dropped below 2.0 they kicked you out for one long semester, and if you came back after that time and got your GPA up above 2.0 in a single semester you were good…and if you didn’t, you were kicked out for a full year.

but summer school didn’t count – so if you came back during summer school and got your grades up you could return in the fall, no harm, no foul. but if you sunk yourself worse you were still out just for a long semester. i tried to rescue my grades with this summer school loophole, but i sunk myself worse, so i was out for the fall of 1992. mom gave me two choices – work somewhere, or volunteer somewhere…just sitting on my ass wasn’t an option. since i was never much of a “nine to five” person (and i’m still not) i elected to volunteer at the lockhart athletic club, a gym in town that offered weight training, boxing, and karate, all sponsored by the police department.

i became the “night volunteer” which meant working 6pm-10pm monday-friday, but i got to use all the weight crap for free AND i got a key to the place. i actually kept that up for almost five years till the place closed, even lasting through the building move.

in that time i read a metric shit ton of donated literature on weight lifting, including almost a decade of muscle & fitness magazine. so i know some shit when it comes to lifting. while some things have changed, and i can now easily keep up with such shit online (in my air conditioned home – the LAC buildings never were), a lot of things haven’t and so i occasionally find myself giving out unsolicited work out advice. most of the time it goes over well with younger folk, while older guys tend to ignore me probably figuring they know more than me since they’ve been doing what they do since the 80’s or whatever.

but yesterday the younger thing did NOT go over well…i was told when i corrected a twenty-something on his utterly ineffective lifting technique that would more than likely result an injury instead of muscle mass gain his buddy jumped in that i should present my “theory” as “an alternate way as compared to what they were doing” stating that “there is more than one route to ‘arrive at your destination’, ya know”.

i agreed that while his last statement was correct, that his “route” would not land him at said “destination” and that if he wanted to have destroyed tissue by the time he was my age to keep on going. that’s when i told him there was “no such thing as ‘exer-shaming’ and he needed to chill” to which he replied, “if it’s not a thing why is there a word for it?”

i explained i had just made it up…which i thought i had, but apparently it’s a thing (per google) – although it only appears in a couple spots several years ago.

so the generation before this one turned out to be violently allergic to peanuts and other foods…now the new one has picked up an allergy to constructive criticism? i’ll be damned – the human race is pretty fucked in another generation or two…