EFL Blog

Another day another blog post without a product to sell you.  And I dare call myself a fitness professional? For shame….

However I am going to write about a topic that may make it seem like I’m tooting my own horn, but rest assured that I know damn well there people in my neighborhood, on my block, that are doing more than I to help out others that need it. Still, I feel pretty good about helping out some kids and am fortunate to have friends such as Roland Denzel, Galaya Denzel, Robert Dos Remedios, and Dewey Nielson who kindly donated their time and resources to come to Portland and help out some local kids.

Fitness Business guru Thomas Plummer recently wrote a piece about the horrors of visiting a Wal-Mart and witnessing how many people, even kids out there are straight up obese. He challenged fitness professionals to do something, anything in their community to begin affecting some type of change among populations that will likely never step inside a gym or pick up a decent fitness magazine.

By the way I encourage anyone interested in fitness to read Thom’s blog. Besides being an entertaining writer he simply does not know how to not express his view of the state of the fitness industry.

But back to his misadventure at Wal-Mart I can relate to Thom’s horror. There is an elementary school down the block from our house and I’m constantly amazed and horrified at the size and condition of kids getting out of their parents cars. Recently I saw a kid that could have been no more than 10 having to be helped out of his overweight parent’s SUV he was so overweight. You could tell he already had some mobility issues going on from the way he walked.

At ten years old!

If nothing changes imagine what his health will be like when he’s working at a sedentary job… That’s pretty f**king scary.

On the other side of things today I visited the Boys and Girls Club in North Portland in order to hand them a check for the $900 we raised through the Elemental Fitness Clinic. Nathan, the guy running the show there told me that the site the club sits on was ten years ago the worst area in the city and notorious for drive by shootings and drugs. Community leaders took charge and razed the buildings and built a brand new school and community center and began to turn things around.

Handing the $900 check from the Elemental Fitness Clinic to the Boys and Girls Club

Today walking around there kids were running and playing on a ball field and no sign of those sorts of problems.

He had kids playing some sort of Gladiator game that looked really fun while others were playing air hockey, and some outside on the basketball courts. Inside the computer lab kids from about 10 to 18 were busy reading and helping each other, all very behaved. In short pretty impressive for that many kids to be there actively engaged in learning and sports on an August day.

They had a cool little fitness center in there too and I hope some of our contributions will be able to help keep functional.

Fitness Room at the North Portland Boys and Girls Club

1. When you think you are doing all you can to help people as a trainer go down to any facility like the Boys and Girls Club and see how many people they are helping on a daily basis. It will take about 2 seconds to realize we can do more.

2. Despite what we may see on TV there are a lot of really well behaved kids out there living in low income areas that are going to do well in life. But they can definitely use a leg up when facing a tough economic and social reality.

So not to get all political on you but be careful what you read or hear in the media about lazy poor people gaming the system.  There are a lot of people that can and do respond to a little help. I saw that first hand and you so will you if you make an effort to get out there.

Next time I’ll get back to reviewing some research topics and maybe some controversy about whether to crunch or not.