Well, they better eat their hearts out. A significant number of Yuppinoys are spending their dough inside gyms and fitness centers these days and coming out of them feeling wiser, healthier, wealthier and better. The race to the golf course and to the badminton courts is outpaced only by workaholics who can’t wait for the tick of 5 to ditch their suits and ties in favor of shirts, shorts and rubber shoes.
Not since Olivia Newton-John exhorted a generation to "Let’s get physical – let your body talk" had physical fitness crept back firmly into our consciousness. Hum, this with the lingering subliminal hymn from the irrepressibly comical and Bisaya Yoyoy Villame and we’d wake up with a musical reminder that "Mag-exercise tayo tuwing umaga, tuwing umaga. Mag-exercise tayo tuwing umaga, upang ang katawan ay sumigla." Hurrah!
The reason for the renewed fancy in health and physical fitness may well be a withdrawal symptom from the unhealthiness of contemporary living. After all, the daily grind normally begins with puffing clouds of carcinogen while heeding the call of nature inside a toilet. Talk about air pollution. Then comes the typical Filipino breakfast of fried rice, fried eggs, fried tocino, tapa, longganisa. In short, fried everything that pumps cholesterol into our bloodstreams. Talk about a cardiac arrest waiting for a warrant.
Then, the trip to the office becomes a choking experience of snarled traffic and unavoidable encounters with mobile smog machines. Everything after shifts to high gear with every bone and muscle working double-time to beat deadlines and cope with the regular wear and tear of till and toil.
Work-related stress, occupational anxieties, professional angst and the usual office bickering are indeed common occurrences that could reduce the mind, the body and the spirit of the working man into dysfunctional parts of an alienated automaton which could conk out and croak with neither hint nor warning.
Every cog in the machine of industry braves such dreadful drudgeries day in and day out but rarely braves the regimen of exercises needed by the body. Rarely do we forget to work but we always neglect to work out. Ordinarily, boozing is the bond of the working man. Along with the booze comes the pulutan pig-outs, the smoking orgies and every conceivable vice that operates on overdrive at nighttime which all abuse the body.
No wonder that during the swinging early ’90s, the bulging belly has become a status symbol of sorts that seemingly gauged one’s success and predilection towards prosperity while struggling with bouts of strokes were considered favoring the rich and the moneyed.
But not anymore. In this day and age of the lingering effects of Asian flu that has plagued the country like SARS, it’s no small wonder that Senator-doctor Juan Flavier has become the poster boy and spokesman for a healthy and physically fit lifestyle with his compelling advertorial decree: "Bawal Magkasakit!"
This, aside from the need to confront the difficult times by taking up belt-tightening measures – literally and figuratively. Thus, tummies are tucked, the country is one big no-smoking zone and gyms and fitness centers are sweatshops where one pays and does not get paid for expending time and energy to burn fats from every part of the anatomy. In short, a simpler and healthier lifestyle has become de rigueur once more for most – and hopefully for all.
After all, fitness centers and gyms are making a killing these days with a growing number of the fitness faithful flocking to these health hubs. Unlike the past decades where gyms have been transformed into instant aerobic centers during the fleeting aerobics fad of the late ’80s and the entire ’90s, they have now adapted to a new generation of clients whose needs and wants go beyond keeping slim and trim.
Before, gyms had an image problem considering that they somehow developed a reputation for being a halfway house for overweight matronas or for underachieving, balding executives in the midst of a middle-age crisis.
Or, gyms waft the stuffy scent of stinking and stocky body-builders with low self-worth and whose idea of proving their manhood and masculinity is to bench-press tons of barbell, imagining them to be the consolidated weight of all the bouncing boobs of the Baywatch Babes.
But now, gyms and fitness centers have become a one-stop shop for everything that a tired and weary soul may well be looking for. Re-fitted with state-of-the-art exercise equipment complete with computerized monitoring systems and audio-visual appliances that make sweating out an experience in chilling out, fitness centers double also as health food snack bars, fruit shake stalls, oriental medicine clinics, herbal drug stores, spas and sauna salons boasting of mid-sized swimming pools and Jacuzzis.
They, too, have shaped up to become schools for the martial arts and aerobic centers that expand to sports supply shops that peddle all sorts of sports wear and equipment. It’s definitely a redux of singing up once again in our favorite grade school and high school subject – P.E. – but with all the ease and luxury of breaking a sweat without raking up the dirt.
More than these, the fitness center culture has evolved into a physical and intellectual melting spot that forges a bond among the buffaholics who come from all walks of life. In a sense, any fitness center is both a playpen and a party place where everybody who’s either somebody or a nobody could have a chitchat about anybody and anything, from the mundane and the trifling to the serious and the intellectually stimulating. How many pieces of free legal and medical advice have been given and taken while pushing the pedals on a treadmill? How many expert opinions on the state of the economy have been said and heard in between crunches?
Credit the adaptive and innovative abilities of these new fitness centers for injecting vim, vigor and variety into the health and fitness scene that made them a good business for their proprietors and their patrons. After all, money is made and spent by people who learn that health is wealth while teaching us that working out should be all in a day’s work.