Environment vs. Health

As I was going through my regular health webpage reads, I came across a post about air pollution and exercising outdoors. The tips to help deal with this were somewhat interesting, but I found the comments and the belief that exercising indoors, particularly in a gym ironic, frustrating and funny all at once. Gyms are another indicator that our society has gotten a little bit upside down. These are heated and cooled, lighted places where people can use machines that may or may not require electricity to make sure they're getting enough exercise. The irony is that people seem to think, "Well, I'm safe from outdoor air pollution because I exercise indoors." Meanwhile, gyms and driving to and from them only contributes more to air pollution (especially if they get their power from coal, as many places do) and make our environment evermore inhospitable for us. Never mind the fact that there is a whole different kind of air pollution indoors, which may or may not be worse for you, depending on the specific situations put up for comparison.

The truth is, I've had a gym membership. There's a whole host of reasons why I barely used it, but the bottom line is, it just makes more sense to me to incorporate exercise into my day in other ways and I find it much more enjoyable to exercise outdoors than to be crammed into a gym with the variously poor and annoying stimulation it offers. (The same site linked above had a post about being hit on at the gym not so long ago. Sometimes I think the real reason some people go to the gym is for the social aspect.) I do think there are good reasons for places where people engage in fitness indoors, but it's not so we can work out in a line of treadmills and elliptical machines.

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