preview

Fitness And Health Centered Lifestyle

Better Essays

The New Year has arrived, and with it, a deluge of New Year’s resolutions. Many of these resolutions are fitness based. In fact, 27%, the majority, of all resolutions are directly related to a fitness and health centered lifestyle (statisticbrain.com). People want to start exercising, but for many of them, it is unclear where they should start. A major contributing factor to the confusion is what type of exercise program to choose. Two methods make up the majority of exercise routines, calisthenics and weightlifting. In brief, calisthenics is exercising using only one’s bodyweight, while weightlifting is using special equipment to exercise. Examples of calisthenics exercises are push-ups, sit ups, and squats. Weightlifting can include …show more content…

If a man was stuck in the woods or in a small room, he would be able to complete his calisthenics workout just as easily as if he would at his house or the gym. This would not be the case if his workout was weightlifting based, unless he happens upon a fully-equipped gym while in the woods. Both exercises vary in their starting prices. A calisthenics-based workout has an average starting cost of $0, because it is done with the body weight of the exerciser, which comes pre-installed. Conversely, the average gym membership is $58 a month (Costa) which adds up to $696 a year. Purchasing the equipment for at-home use is even more expensive, costing an upwards of $3,300 for the five most common and versatile exercise devices (Lauletta) and an entire room would be required to house all of it. Regarding convenience, calisthenics is far superior.
Risk plays a large role in deciding on exercise programs, especially for those who are older or have a history of injury. Counterintuitively, calisthenics has much more risk involved than weightlifting. Non-weightlifting based exercises cause an average 154,152 injuries annually. Contrarily, only 49,246 injuries caused by lifting weights occur on average every year. Non-weightlifting exercises are more than three times as likely to cause injury compared to weightlifting exercises. The number of injuries is increasing as well, as 346, 968 non-weightlifting exercise injuries and 102,825 weightlifting injuries were reported in

Get Access