A machine for stretching, when will it end?

The damn stretching machine

It was a few months ago when I re-read Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World'. It is a dystopian novel about a future where babies are hatched in 'Hatcheries', not born, where people worship Henry Ford, the Father or Consumerism and where people consume - a lot. For any sport to be given approval by whatever ministries that were set up, it had to require a serious amount of manufacturing. Gone were the days when a ball would be enough to keep children entertained for hours, now they needed expensive, complicated gadgets. And all this to keep the economy ticking over nicely.

I remembered this story when I was at the gym yesterday. I decided to use my free personal training session that I had been given when I first joined the gym. Truth be told I was a little apprehensive. I'd seen personal training sessions before at this gym, and what I gathered was that at some point or another the personal trainer ends up lying on top of the trainee. Now whether this was a requirement or every training session or not, I did not know, but I had never seen it before in any English gym I'd frequented.

The first piece of kit the very handsome Chinese trainer took me to was a stretching machine. I don't know about you, but I'd always thought that stretching was a pretty standard practice that simply required the human being and a piece of floor. It seems though, that the great forces of capitalism have convinced unsuspecting folk that they now need to buy a machine to stretch on.

The Stretching Machine - consumerism gone mental

In the picture above I demonstrate doing a calf stretch. But the thing is, stretching my calf whilst standing on the floor, rather than sitting on this bloody machine is a million times more effective. I almost went crazy. I read in Charles Eisenstein's book 'Sacred Economics', that the way our economy grows is by taking something that was once free, and making us pay for it. Stretching was once free, now people have to supposedly pay for it. What?

After this, the personal trainer took me to a number of other machines. One was the standard 'Pull-the-bar-to-your-chest' contraption, and I've used such machines a lot in the past, so I thought I had it down. Wrong! The PT began alternating between pulling at the skin between my shoulder blades and forcing my shoulders together painfully. I really couldn't understand what he wanted from me but finally I had to tell him to stop because it was getting painful.

It was by the time of the fourth machine when I had had enough of machines. 'I hate machines!' I screamed. The PT laughed, 'No, machines are good'. I couldn't help shaking the thought that there was a time that we didn't need artificial machines in an artificial environment to keep fit. We would be fit by the work we did, or by the sports we played with our friends. Now that our society has become so fragmented and disconnected from itself, most people go to work in an office where they sit on chairs all day, facing a computer screen. From this, they get money but lose health. They then take this money and give it to gyms and doctors to get their health back. Or how our disconnected consumer lifestyle leaves us empty of something fundamentally human - human connections and love - that we fill this hole with food, drugs or other destructive things. What is going on?

So, I refused to use another machine and I continued my personal training using just a mat on the floor.