In a not-so-long-ago era, my recent experience at The Vitamin Shoppe in Santa Monica would not have been a blog-worthy experience. Once upon a time it was common to walk into a retail store and engage with someone who was well versed in the company’s products and cared enough to…
As a lifelong weight training buff who took up the activity when it was relegated to dingy, unventilated rooms reeking of body odor, it was quite the thrill to see the athlete who popularized the sport while training at the legendary gym he made famous.
Allow me a few minutes of your time and I’ll pump you up.
My response to a recent article in The Guardian headlined, ‘Watch this creep’: the women exposing gym harassment on TikTok.
Careful readers of this blog (of which there aren’t yet as many as I’d like) know that I’m no fan of Equinox Fitness, the swanky, ridiculously overpriced gym chain catering to celebrities, wannabes, and the self-absorbed. I’m also no fan of Stephen Ross, who I briefly met at a reception…
My elusive search for a meaningful yoga practice began nearly three decades ago when I was living on New York’s Upper East Side. I was looking to meet spiritually minded people and, in those days, yoga was associated with the crunchy granola set. The practice was still sufficiently foreign that…
I wouldn’t want to mess with Greg Glassman, the founder and CEO of CrossFit. You might mistakenly perceive CrossFit as just a gritty gym in your neighborhood, but it’s a global network of 15,000 facilities in 160 countries, generating an estimated $100 million in revenues. Glassman is reportedly also worth…
I don’t get Nike, New Balance, and other athletic footwear manufacturers. They spend billions on research and development creating and refining their increasingly sophisticated sneakers yet they are forever flatfooted educating customers about the competitive advantages of their respective products. The industry’s front-line product specialists are mostly kids working part-time…
As a young adult in my native Toronto, I worked out at a dilapidated gym known as the “Old Jewish Y.” The moniker was due to Toronto’s Jewish community moving miles north and building a suburban state-of-the-art community center. The original facility was left open as a sop to the…