Making No Bones About The Fitness Rort
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday August 18, 1987
Terry Ly, pictured on his exercise bike, is too polite to say that lots of instructors in the fitness business don't care much about damage to the parts displayed by his mate on the other bike.
Terry will merely say there are a lot of "misinformed instructors" who promise "ludicrous and physiologically impossible things".
Such instructors are driving people away from aerobics classes with injured backs and muscles, he says. Educating the public to recognise a bad aerobics class is a major issue in the business.
In many gyms, beginners' classes use inappropriate advanced exercises which lead people to reject exercise outright.
"A really bad instructor will get a class on the floor with no warm-up, and go straight into a high intensity activity. By the end of the exercise, three-quarters of the class are exhausted."
The NSW Department of Consumer Affairs says that in the past two years it has received 1,400 complaints about gymnasiums.
Mr Ly said there had not yet been litigation on poor exercise advice here on the scale of the US, but it only needed one action to start a rush of claims.
"Too many people think that to do aerobics you have to have a beautiful body," he said.
"People feel intimidated when they walk into a gym and see beautiful bodies all round them."
This was worse when the exercises demanded superb coordination skills.
The University of NSW this month began the first course on the physiology and management of exercise in a tertiary institute. The course was designed by Mr Ly, who is working for a PhD in exercise physiology.
The aim of the course is to produce a small number of highly-trained instructors to raise the standard generally.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald