Bootcamp Workouts: Bringing the War Home

When you’ve worked in gyms as long as I have, you become numb to the fitness-as-military-worship motif. For example, bootcamps, civilian-military combines, Navy Seals this or that, and the ever-ubiquitous “Train Like a Soldier!”

This approach not only normalizes the dangerous “soldier as hero” myth but also has the potential to turn something healthy like exercise into a dysfunctional obsession.

With this in mind, I allowed myself to imagine what it would look like if I were asked to create a truly “realistic” Marine bootcamp fitness.

Step 1: Create an Enemy

Since preparing for war is most rewarding when you have an especially evil enemy, gym members will suddenly be greeted with posters depicting the owners and members of a nearby gym to be plotting our destruction. I’ll have daily e-mail blasts, fabricated videos, and falsified internal memos to help back up the claim. Give me one week and my gym’s members will hate and revile the other gym’s members.

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Step 2: Bankrupt the Gym in Order to Save It

I’ll raise our gym membership fees for all members — except those in the top 1 percent in terms of income, of course — and use at least 50 percent of these ever-increasing fees to fund my class even if that means other functional aspects of the gym are neglected. Hey, anyone who complains about broken treadmills or a dirty sauna is clearly trying to help the evil-doers win.

Step 3: Encourage “Gym Support”

On the first day of class, I’ll have three initial goals for my students:

• Crush their spirit

• Erase all independent thought

• Teach them to accept humiliation as normal

From there, it’ll be easy to convince them to never disobey an order.

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Step 4: Push Them Past Any Reasonable Limits

I’ll kick things up a notch… or three. In no time, I’ll be able to sit back and watch the trainees spouting my words to shame the weak links in the class. To keep the military metaphor as accurate as possible, I’d expect at least half of the female (oops, “assigned female at birth”) students to be harassed.

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Step 5: Provoke a Pretext

Classic stuff: I’ll get a couple of my fellow trainers to disguise themselves in the rival gym’s colors before attacking two of my students on the street. By the next morning, the members of my gym will be lining up to pay higher dues in the name of retribution. Hey, every war needs a fabricated “pretext,” right?

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Step 6: Shock & Awe.

Finally, I set my students loose on the other gym — in the name of humanitarianism, of course. They’ll leave it destroyed, looted, and toxic from our secret use of banned weapons. Meanwhile, everyone will be too distracted and proud to notice as our gym devolves into utter disrepair. Just in case, we’ll hand out free ribbons in the shape of a kettlebell so gym patriots can show their support for the brave men and “uterus-havers” fighting for their freedom.

Of course, when the war ends, we’ll find a good reason to “boot” the bootcamp students out of the gym with no medical help to deal with the physical and emotional scars of their experiences. 

When many of them inevitably wind up homeless, we’ll mock and demonize them for being so soft and out of shape. But fear not, if any of these former heroes die, we’ll make certain they’re given the honor of a coffin draped in the logo of our gym!

Are you ready to sign up?

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Btw, within minutes of this post going live, a well-known physician/Covid dissident (and two-time guest on my podcast) unsubscribed. Here’s to the “truth” movement!