YouTube Craziness

With the coronavirus disrupting everyone's life, social media has exploded in response. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have all burst out a plethora of videos, rants, and chants encouraging, and showing people how, to stay fit while gyms all over the country are closed. A lot of people want to show how you can workout with the most ordinary things that are sitting around your house. Good. That is all very good.

At the risk of sounding negative, however, I have a couple of critiques. Just a couple. I am not the only one, and I don't want to rehash what others have already done. These are a couple that registered with me.

One critique is a bit mild. I watched one video of a man on a nice bench with an Olympic bar bench pressing with water bottles tied to the bar. Huh? You have a top of the line bench and a slick looking Olympic bar but no plates? It obviously was a staged video, a me-to video, sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his hot tub at his mansion talking about how tough the lock down was. This guy was acting like he was suffering trying to find a way to get a workout while he obviously owns good equipment.

Another was a man doing overhead presses with an Olympic bar that had plates on one side and a tire on another. What!?!?! I have seen this guy's videos before all this changed our lives. He has plates. But again, he had to act like he was being creative and doing the best he could. What if that tire slips off the end of the bar?

The worst example I have taken the time to watch was a man doing deadlifts with a bar and two huge wooden spools on the end. This was pretty shocking. If one of those spools slipped off (they looked pretty precarious) someone was going straight to snap city. And snapping up your back is pretty bad not to count pretty stupid

I wrote all of this because, like you, I am at home and doing a lot more of the things I usually do only a little bit of. I am watching more videos, thinking more about working out, and writing more on this blog. I think people trying to help, to inspire, is a good thing. I have seen some really good examples of people giving good advice. Creativity is a good thing, but there is sometimes a fine line between creativity and stupidity. A few people are crossing that line. Be careful out there. Stay safe. Stay sane. Judge carefully what you see given freely as advice. A lot of it is good. Some of it is not.