I love reading about personal finance, simplifying life, and even being frugal — I’ve got dozens of related feeds in my Google Reader — but sometimes these people go a bit too far. And I’ve got a beef with Flexo’s 10 reasons not to go to the gym at Consumerism Commentary:

1. Most new memberships in January will cancel by April. That’s a lot of New Year’s Resolutions gone bad.
2. There is bacteria everywhere, including on the equipment and in the locker room towels.
3. Gyms aren’t equipped to handle health emergencies.
4. People don’t need any type of certification to become trainers, and they may not know much more than you.
5. They make it very difficult to quit membership. If you don’t pay, they may report you to credit reporting agencies even if you claim you canceled your membership.
6. There are catches in the fine print of the membership contract.
7. Gyms aren’t required to maintain their equipment, so there can be a danger in operating the equipment.
8. You can negotiate your membership rates by paying attention to specials offered throughout the year.
9. The lockers in which you leave your personal belongings can be robbed, and the gym is not held liable.
10. By joining or even entering a gym, you generally sign a waiver that relieves the company of any liability.

Seriously people? Are you honestly trying to make an argument to keep Americans out of the gym? We’re not fat enough already?

Let’s look at this bad logic item by item:

Bad reason #1: 1. Most new memberships in January will cancel by April. That’s a lot of New Year’s Resolutions gone bad.
Okay, and most new businesses fail within the first year. Should I not bother trying to start a business either? Hey… did you know that 65% of new marriages fail? By Flexo’s reasoning, that means nobody should get married, either.

I have a problem with people using generic terms like “most” and “a lot” in these arguments. How about some hard numbers?

Or how about a different perspective… some of these people do stick to their workout. If even one life is improved, what’s the problem?

Bad reason #2: There is bacteria everywhere, including on the equipment and in the locker room towels.
There’s bacteria on the door at the 7-Eleven, too. And what about the shopping carts where you buy your groceries? In fact, speaking of groceries, how many old ladies have picked up and handled that apple you’re about to put in your mouth? Good heavens… the germs are going to kill us all! Time to start wearing masks and gloves everywhere. Hey, and how about a nice tinfoil hat, too!

Look. You’re not going to the gym to lick the weight bench… you’re there to get a workout. And the nice thing about the gym is that there’s a shower there. With soap. You’ll leave there cleaner than you were when you arrived.

Bad reason #3: Gyms aren’t equipped to handle health emergencies.
Neither is the city bus you ride, but you manage to get by just fine. The park your kids are playing at doesn’t have a nurse on staff, yet if little Johnny falls off the slide and scrapes his arm, you manage to get it dealt with. And frankly, if a health emergency did occur at a gym, you’d be surrounded by people who would help you… which is much better than your odds at home!

Bad reason #4: People don’t need any type of certification to become trainers, and they may not know much more than you.
Yup. There are lots of jobs you can get that don’t require certification. (Remember that horse groomer who used to be the head of FEMA?)

The nice thing about trainers is that looks are everything. If a fat guy tells you how you should eat, are you going to listen? It’s just like the high school woodshop teacher who was missing a finger. If the trainer is in good shape and you’re not, odds are that he knows something you don’t.

Bad reason #5: They make it very difficult to quit membership. If you don’t pay, they may report you to credit reporting agencies even if you claim you canceled your membership.
To be honest, this sounds like Flexo had a bad experience, and he’s applying that as a prejudice against all gyms. Besides… if you don’t pay your bills, you shouldn’t be surprised if it gets reported to credit agencies.

Yes, I’ll admit that there is an overall sense that gyms don’t make it easy to quit. But this is a victim mentality. The membership representatives have an incentive to keep you, and they’re going to ask you the questions that any salesman would ask you: Why do you want to quit? Is there something we can do to keep you? Don’t you want to be healthy any more?

The reason people have a hard time quitting is because these questions play to the lies people tell themselves. Everyone wants to believe that they’re concerned about their health. Nobody wants to admit that they are too lazy to show up and work out. The only reason you want to cancel your membership is because you finally realized that purchasing a membership does not, by itself, get you into shape. You have to actually do work.

If you’re committed to being fat and lazy, just own up to it. Walk into the rep’s office, look him dead in the eye, and say, “I am a fat, lazy slob. I have learned that about myself, and I’m not going to change. Your policy requires 30 days notice on cancellation of membership, so this is my notice. Give me a document that proves you have acknowledged my desire to terminate my membership.”

Ironically, however, if you can man up enough to say that, you could probably man up enough to use the membership and actually get some benefit. The reason it’s hard to quit is the same reason the membership isn’t working: you don’t have any balls.

Bad reason #6: There are catches in the fine print of the membership contract.
Only an idiot signs his name to something he has not read. If there was something in there that you consider to be “a catch”, you shouldn’t have joined in the first place. See #5 above.

Bad reason #7: Gyms aren’t required to maintain their equipment, so there can be a danger in operating the equipment.
If a gym had poorly maintained equipment, you should have noticed that on your tour before you joined. If the equipment has gone bad over time, you should leave and find a new gym. This guy has a serious victim mentality, and he’s just making excuses now.

Anyway, what is there to maintain? There are no moving parts on barbells, dumbells, weight benches, or power racks. If you’re using the isolation exercise machines (like Nautilus) you’re already risking injury even on a brand new machine. And if it’s the stairmaster or the treadmill you’re complaining about, you’re just a whiner. Save the gym membership and just go climb some stairs. Or go for a walk. Anyway, how are you going to injure yourself on a treadmill? That would be a YouTube gem for sure!

Bad reason #8: You can negotiate your membership rates by paying attention to specials offered throughout the year.
This isn’t a reason to avoid the gym, it’s just an unrelated fact. And you can always negotiate your membership. Don’t believe me? Just go tell the rep that you want to quit. (See #5 above.) Let’s be honest here… this was just thrown in because he couldn’t think of anything to get his list to the nice round number 10.

Bad reason #9: The lockers in which you leave your personal belongings can be robbed, and the gym is not held liable.
Hello, McFly! They’re called LOCK-ers. You are supposed to LOCK them. Once locked in a locker, your property is every bit as safe as it would be in your car.

Let’s get real. I go to the gym every morning, five days a week, and I see what people do. They use the lockers without locking them. They take off their clothes (and iPods) and leave them in a pile on the floor while they hit the showers. Oh, and they also just have stupid moments and forget things.

If you’re putting your valuables into the locker, and locking it, they will be there when you are done.

Bad reason #10: By joining or even entering a gym, you generally sign a waiver that relieves the company of any liability.
As opposed to your home gym? Seriously? His final argument is that he wants someone to sue if he hurts himself? Am I understanding this correctly?

It is not the gym’s fault that you don’t pay attention to proper technique. It is not the gym’s fault that you and your friends want to impress each other with weights you have no business lifting. It is not the gym’s fault that you injured yourself on a treadmill (seriously… a YouTube gem).

Seriously. What’s with all the anti-gym rhetoric lately on all of the personal finance blogs?

[EDIT: I errantly attributed these opinions to Flexo, the author of the post I linked to. The list was actually copied out of SmartMoney. Still, we don't repost things we disagree with.]

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. They’re counterproductive. You start something new on the first day of the year — lose weight, quit smoking, etc — and hope it will stick. In the majority of cases, the first time that new thing meets a setback, it gets marked as a complete failure, and the whole plan gets abandoned. Why waste the time?

It makes more sense to quantify progress and set target dates. For instance, instead of setting a vague goal of saying you want to “get in shape”, only to give up after you’ve had a week or two where you couldn’t get to the gym, why not set real, tangible goals with numbers and dates? Why not plan to lose 20 pounds by June 1? At least then, if you have a setback, there’s no reason to give up!

This year, I am setting real goals. Instead of imagining my life as I want it right now, and then giving up when I realize that’s impossible, I’ve put a lot of thought into where I expect to be in one year, and I will spend 2008 working toward reaching that place.

These are my goals for 2008:

1. Be 100% free of all credit card debt by November.
   After this year, I never want to carry another balance on any revolving credit account. Without debt, I will have financial freedom to do whatever I want. I have chosen November as my target because I also want to have a debt-free Christmas.
2. Move to the city by summer.
   I’m not a suburban kind of person. My heart is in the urban lifestyle. Living in the city will be better for my photography, as well as more convenient for commuting, traveling, and meeting new people. I have chosen summer as my target because there is so much happening in the city during summer.
3. Relocate my father by summer
   My father is one of the unfortunate victims of the high cost of medical care. His prescriptions alone cost more than his income. Without my help he would have to choose each month between a roof over his head, or being (somewhat) healthy, and eating isn’t much of an option. And this is in a poor, southern town in a $40,000 house! Bringing him to a city would give him access to better medical care as well as many aid programs that could reduce his costs and give him access to the care he needs, while also giving him the chance to spend his later years near family.
4. Form a corporation
   Making investments and building assets makes more sense when you have the protections of a corporation. I don’t have a specific target date for this goal because there are many other implications to consider, but I do know that I need to do it, rather than talk or think about it, so I’ve made it a goal for this year.
5. Add 100 lbs to my benchpress
   Specifically, I want to raise my benchpress 50 lbs by summer and another 50 lbs by Christmas, but these increases need to be marked by similar improvements in other strength training areas too, including squats, curls, deadlifts, etc. In other words, I want to increase all my weights, I have simply chosen the benchpress as the measure for reaching my goal.
6. Travel out of state at least once every month
   This is pretty self-explanatory. I want to travel out of the state, whether visiting friends I’ve left behind or going someplace I’ve never been, at least once every month this year. I also want at least one of those trips to be out of the country.

So there it is. Those are my goals for 2008. I look forward to writing about their completion!

While writing about the benefits of working for The Man even when you are self-employed, Brian Lee at Genuis Types puts into words an opinion I have held dear:

Working for The Man and not needing his money is a whole different story. You’re doing him a favor. You’re not afraid of being fired. Your confidence shines through and tends to get you what you want.

That’s golden stuff right there.

When you need your job, and the pay or insurance or benefits it provides, your entire experience becomes colored by that fact. The job becomes “the daily grind”. You do your work sort of grudgingly, as if everything is asking more of you than you want to do. You work late only because of deadlines. And you don’t do the little extra things that allow you to learn cool new stuff, or work on exciting projects. It becomes a rut.

Oh, but how different it is when you don’t need your job. When you have the comfort of knowing you’d be just fine without that job, you have confidence. You take the job because you want it. You stay only because you like it. You stay late only when you’re doing something really cool and you just don’t want to leave yet. You’re willing to take risks and try new things. And you soak up every new learning experience that comes your way.

You don’t have to be rich to reach this point, you only have to make smart decisions and be financially sound. Even while I am still working at paying off the last of my debt and being truly debt free, I also have a comfortable savings to hold me in emergencies, and should that turn out to be not enough, I can also liquidate some investments if it ever became necessary. I’ve never had to do it, but just knowing that I have those options gives me the confidence to be myself wherever I go, rather than become a part of the machine.

The difference it makes in life is huge. Speaking for myself, I am currently in a job that I love, working for a company that is fun and innovative. I am surrounded by interesting, intelligent people and I have opportunities to try new things and learn new things all the time. And best of all, I know that my voice is heard. These are the benefits of taking a position because I wanted it, rather than because I needed it.

I found an article at Girls Who Network, a blog for woman entrepreneurs, which talks about how to build a lifestyle to justify your desire to spend, spend, spend.

Their solution? Figure out what you want to spend, and then create an investment which yields that amount.

Your principal is your “golden goose”, the interest is the “golden eggs”.  You keep the goose and spend the eggs, forever!  As long as your goose lays eggs, you can have a shiny, new car parked in your garage.

For instance, if your desire to be in a new car every few years ends up costing around $6000 per year, you can invest $50,000 at 12%, and then the interest pays for your car without you having to work for it.

While I have a few minor problems with the theory (eg, what about inflation?) I feel that the idea is still an excellent plan and is far better, on the whole, than what most people do with their money.

Jay White at Dumb Little Man offers five tips to improve your social networking skills.

5. Be a Hub: A hub is a connector. Find a way to connect people with what they need and you will be valued. If you meet two people (separately) at an event who you think would benefit from each other- introduce them! Don’t be shy. If they don’t click, they will just walk away. If they do click however, you will be the one they always remember as making that introduction.

This dovetails nicely with the book I’m reading this week, the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, the five tips seems to describe all the key traits of Gladwell’s description of Roger Horchow.

All five tips are good, and I recommend reading them. The book is good to.

A theme I love to go on about is how the things you own end up owning you. Material possessions can serve a purpose, but more and more they becomes suffocating.

Naturally, I took an interest in this Penelope Trunk’s recent entry at the Brazen Careerist, in which she offers five steps to taming materialism, including:

3. Understand the concept of aspirational clutter. Get reality and throw stuff out.
So much of what we hold on to is what we wish we were using — objects that commemorate a life we aspire to but do not have. The six books we bought a year ago and haven’t read, for example. We don’t want to admit that we’re not making time to read, so we save them. The treadmill is another object that is loaded because if you throw it out you’re admitting to yourself that you’re never going to use it. Keeping it, even unused, maintains your dream of getting into shape.

This is something I try to do often in my life. I take an inventory of the things around me and ask myself “am I really using that, or am I just holding on to an idea?” When I’m honest with myself (as I try to be) the reality of the answer is sometimes surprising.

I posted two years ago about the Pareto Principle — also known as the 80/20 rule — pointing to an article by Richard Koch suggesting we can apply this business rule to our daily lives.

The Pareto Principle states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This effect is often noticed in business, where 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. Or, 80% of a project’s gains come from the first 20% of your development efforts.

The logical extension of this thought is that you burn 80% of the effort on the project finishing that last 20%.

So what if we applied this to our lives? What is the value proposition?

It’s not hard for me to imagine that 80% of my happiness comes from the things I do 20% of the time. And likewise, it’s not hard to imagine that 80% of my positive interactions come from that quality core — those 20% of people in my life who add value.

So the question naturally follows, what is that remaining 80% doing for me? What makes of that 80% of things I do, where I’m burning the majority of my energy to get a minimal positive return?

Are there frustrating, difficult, or unrealistic activities I’m participating in that are burning a lot of time and energy but not paying off? Are there people who are eating up the bulk of my time while returning very little happiness or positive interaction?

It’s pretty interesting when you look at your life through the filter of such fundamental economic business principles.

If you burn 80% of your effort on a measly 20% return, it seems theoretically sound that you could cut those activities completely, in favor of taking on four new projects, goals, or activities. If each new activity returned that same 80% benefit from an investment of 20%, your improvement would be an astonishing 320%.

Essentially, by trimming the costly negative activities and replacing them with a light interest in four new activities, your quality of life could be 16 times better!

It’s an interesting thought.

There’s a great little piece on Dumb Little Man this morning about making money productive.

Productivity in this mindset is first cutting stuff out of our life (effectiveness), then finding ways of getting better value for money (efficiency). And since we cut the non-productive stuff out of our budget, we have money extra to go for better value for money deals, even when they require more money!

It’s a short, quick read, but it’s a good reminder to spend wisely.

I’ve been going on and on a lot lately about paying attention to the lessons around you. There’s a saying “when the student is ready, the master will appear” and I’m starting to see that the master appears over and over and over, in the books you read, on the tv shows you watch, in the conversations you have.

Funny, then, that one theme which has come up a lot recently is the difference between reaction and response. How fitting then that Steve Pavlina would have written an entry called Reaction vs Response on his personal development blog yesterday.

Just as interesting is the fact that they topic of authenticity is another one of those things that has been coming up a lot, and while reading Steve’s blog, he had a link in there to another entry, simply called Authenticity.

Many of us have tried weight training in hopes of reducing fat and gaining muscle. We all know that it’s the only way to put on muscle. And many of us are aware that the best way to lose weight is to increase the amount of muscle burning the fat we want to lose.

So if we all know that weight training is the best (or even the only) way to accomplish our goal, why is it that so few of us are ever able to stick to it?

People give up

If I talk about the painful experience of trying to cancel a gym membership, I’ll bet most of my readers will know what I’m referring to. And I’m willing to bet that damn near all of my readers have some exercise equipment from late night tv — the Gazelle, the Ab Lounge, the Bowflex, the Nordic Track, the Fitness Flyer, or that silly thing that Chuck Norris sells — sitting in the attic or the basement or the back porch, with a layer of dust and cobwebs on it.

So why do we all get hyped, and get serious enough about doing this that we spend money on memberships and machines, only to give up after a month or two? Most likely because we’re not getting the results we wanted. Convinced that we’re wasting our time, and that it’s never going to work or that it’s going to take too long, we give up.

If it’s hard, you’re doing it wrong

But it doesn’t have to be too much work. In fact, most bodybuilders will tell you that they made the most significant progress during their first two months. When done right, a weight training program should yield very exciting results right away — enough that you will have no problem sticking to it.

My motto in life is, “If it’s hard, you’re doing it wrong.” I don’t believe that anything has to be hard. When it is, you just need to find a better way.

It starts with common sense

You can’t get stronger if you don’t increase your weights. For some reason, people seem to think they can just use the same weight over and over, forever, and that they’ll somehow get stronger and stronger. They’re wrong.

You can’t get stronger until you know how strong you currently are. First you have to find your limit. Keep adding weight until you can’t lift it, or press it, or squat it, or whatever exercise you’re doing.

Expect exciting results

Once you’ve found your limit, you should find that you’re able to increase it by 5 lbs every week. That’s approximately 50 lbs over two months! In other words, if you start off only able to bench-press 150 lbs, you should be putting up 200 lbs (or close) by the end of your second month.

Those are exciting results, and you should be seeing them on all of your exercises. Seeing that improvement should be enough to motivate you by itself, but the development in your body over that time should be significant and exciting as well.

It all starts with common sense, though. You can’t get stronger if you don’t add more weight.