This time of year, fitness media is awash in platitudes and memes, exhorting everyone to get in the gym and get after it. But in a few months, another crop of resolutioners will have fallen off the wagon, and Americans will continue their inexorable slide into physical disease and decay.
This time of year, fitness media is awash in platitudes and memes, exhorting everyone to get in the gym and get after it. But in a few months, another crop of resolutioners will have fallen off the wagon, and Americans will continue their inexorable slide into physical disease and decay.
We at Breaking Muscle, and the fitness industry at large, have done an excellent job of defining the problem, and then preaching to the converted. But the time for incremental gains has long past. What’s needed at this point, if we hope to make a substantial dent in the crises that face our population, are sweeping, society-wide changes.
This is a difficult sphere in which to operate for a bunch of meatheads, coaches, writers, and small business owners. That’s why this year, we’re going to call in the experts. Philip K Howard is a bestselling author and political consultant, and the chair of Common Good, whose purpose is to simplify bureaucratic structures so people can get about the business of getting things done.
Howard has researched and written for decades about the effective role government can play (and most often doesn’t) in improving the lives of its citizens. He sat down with me to discuss how our obsession with eliminating risk is stunting the development of our children, and the simple reforms we could enact to regain parity with our European competitors. We also cover the unintended consequences that often result from well-intended regulation, what avenues are available to address standardization in the fitness industry, and where we can expect the revolution to begin.
