Physical activities that encourage/support very unfit people doing them
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
Winner winner chicken dinner! |
Anonymous
There is at my barn. I thought that this would be someone looking for suggestions for getting more fit, not someone shaming people for trying to get more fit. I was going to suggest power walking but I betcha it's a CrossFit class. |
Anonymous
| Assuming they are all adults of sound mind you need to MYOB |
Anonymous
| What a strange lot of responses to OP! Fat shaming??! Anecdotally, I know a number of people who have sustained injuries while doing yoga and there are a ton of instructors out there who have done minimal training and do not keep an eye out for people doing moves without the correct form. This sounds similar. There is an assumption when you do ANY class that the instructors are professionally trained which includes minimising the likelihood of injury through poor form or poor skills. If a participant has no training in that particular form of activity, they are not necessarily qualified to know which can be harmful. |
Anonymous
| The way OP talks about injury, I assume it's CrossFit. Injury is the main attraction of CrossFit. Nobody serious about health and fitness does CrossFit. It's for posers. |
Anonymous
| I feel pretty strongly that it's crossfit. Between the injuries, the instructors praising people for trying and the idea of hanging from a bar, it HAS to be crossfit. I just don't know why OP is so offended that overweight people are trying to get in shape. |
Anonymous
Ding, ding, it's this. |
Anonymous
OP here and I think it's great when anyone decides to work on their fitness. But some activities don't improve your fitness, they just test it, and it's probably best to avoid them until you have the requisite strength. |
Anonymous
The reason you’re being appropriately smacked around is because you assumed that because these people were fat that they were unfit. |
Anonymous
The irony to this is if you met me, you’d discover I am a very fit person who does not conform to the expectation that fit women are small and thin. I am genuinely not shaming anyone in this class for their body types. The class itself involved no actual fitness— no warm up, strength building, stretching, nothing. Several people in class told me it’s their main form of exercise. It was clear a handful of students actually train to do this activity— there were a few advanced students in class (none of them were thin, but they were clearly fit) and it’s obvious they train for this activity with a heavy focus on upper body and core strength. The rest of the students told me they’d been taking these classes for years. But it was clear they did little to no training outside the class and several complained about struggling with basic fitness activities, like holding a plank. Pretty much everyone I talked to told me about some injury ir another they’d suffered from doing the activity. Some of the unfit people were thin. I also worry about their risk of injury. But the nature of this activity involves carrying your entire body weight on her hands and shoulders, so I do think if you have excess weight, that risk will be higher. I just don’t understand why this school isn’t doing more to support students in improving fitness *before* pursuing this specific activity. They could offer a progression if classes that supports students in reaching their goals. But it appears most of their classes are all levels, and I don’t see any training or strength classes on their schedule. This is baffling to me. It would be like offering diving classes without making sure your students could swim first. |
Anonymous
If these people aren’t going to listen to their doctor, why do you think they would listen to a class instructor? If the class says they’re too fat or not in good enough shape, how are they going to measure that? What’s the litmus test? Your little exercise school will simply go under after they get sued for discrimination. |
Anonymous
It would be very easy, and non-discriminatory, to say that you need to be able to perform some basic body weight exercises before engaging in a risky activity. Like if you required people to be able to do hold a plank for 30 seconds with good form, one negative pull-up with control, etc. It would also be appropriate to let students know that if they can't perform an activity with certain elements of good form, then they cannot do that specific skill until they had completed necessary strength/fitness work to improve that form. None of this is discriminatory and no court would find it that way. I understand wanting to make fitness accessible to people of all body types and skill levels, but sometimes that means offering a more basic, entry level version of the activity until someone has the requisite fitness to level up. We do this with kids -- imagine sending your kid to a gymnastics facility where they let kids try big, risky tricks before they'd trained the basics. But since adults can sign a liability waiver, we just shrug and say "oh well." I wouldn't be comfortable with that if I was teaching those classes. |
Anonymous
| Whatever OP—you are being way too coy about what the class is, probably because it’s obvious that your concerns are over blown and coming from a place of moral superiority. |