The couch thread

[Testiclaw]

He was a gymnast while he had polio.

The limp is from a tragic floor routine, when his iron lung rolled off the mat and into the parallel bars.

[TerryB]

the voiceover said he had polio as a kid. i thought the limp was from a gymnastics accident. has the personal story changed?

Was he born in 1915?

[Kazuya Mishima]

Is GG Jewish? This would explain a lot, actually.

[Grandpa's Spells]

So you all realize GG was on 60 Minutes Sunday night right? He does have a pronounced limp.

Yeah, I caught the tail end of the segment. There he was in all his glory...dressed like Teddy Ruxpin and stinking of gin.

i just watched a couple minutes.

the voiceover said he had polio as a kid. i thought the limp was from a gymnastics accident. has the personal story changed?

From transcript:

He had polio as a child and used gymnastics to regain his strength. In high school, a bad dismount left him with a permanent limp. He became a personal trainer and started experimenting with some of the exercises that would become the backbone of his creation.

[Blaidd Drwg]

What American 50 year old had Polio?

[Bud Charniga's grape ape]

Polio vaccine became widespread in the US in the early 60s. So it's just barely possible that he would'nt have been vaccinated. But I'm dubious.

[TerryB]

did they discuss the super secret black ops training routines he tried? the ones that were too dangerous to unleash on the world??

[Kazuya Mishima]

I used to hold the bar 3-5 inches out in front of my body while doing heavy deads until this video straightened me out...thanks for the insight Coach!!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlZrkssHxA[/youtube]

[Thud]

Something as trivial as polio couldn't deter the couch. A foam mat on the other hand...

[Kazuya Mishima]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcs6C1AD-VU[/youtube]

[theoverman]

[Blaidd Drwg]

I know....Without a doubt the HQ brand of CrossFit is a substandard training program; CrossFit causes significant injuries; they sweep this under the rug; their poster boy athletes are juiced to the gills and cherry picked: the Games has all the integrity of a reality TV show and HQ has an enormous staff to protect their brand because, like Bikram, their empire is so very fragile and so ripe to fail.

Despite all of this...I still found this piece pretty fucking compelling. GG is a ludicrous lying piece of shit. Good for him

[Shafpocalypse Now]

I bet he nailed her. 7th kid? Awesome

[Shafpocalypse Now]

Compelling indeed. We have lost the battles and the war itself, eh?

[Shafpocalypse Now]

I Should have cashed in in 2004. He's made a lot of people very well off along the way

[Danny John]

I was told by someone in the system that he didn't get the vaccine because his father thought it was a plot. If it is not true, i apologize, but Greg is my age...we don't get polio in our generation.

[terra]

Watching that 60 minutes clip I see how he has done what he did.

There is a formula to it. You see the less talented old rock and rollers who do/did the same thing to go from small time to big time. Whenever a media type throws something to tame or challenge them, their response goes the extra mile into full retard.

We the audience can't help but find it charismatic at a more base, teenage brain level. Throw in a half shit product (like many rock and roll acts that made it on image) and people will queue for their escape. Big names will befriend you because you have assembled a congregation of image led idiots to which they can also hock their image based products em mass.

There's 4 licensed @fit boxes in my local area all within a non-pukey running distance of each other. Plus, it has seeped into the larger gym chains around here. Many of which have totally redone their facilities to become little more than big boxes with a some power racks and few specialist machines for the figure girls to hit their glutes from 73 different angles... I.e. The big gyms are reinventing themselves as a place where you can do @fit workouts.

Then there's the 'mobile' gyms. Guys that rent space on the foreshore and pull up with a big van containing equipment for the workout of the day. Doing a kind of outdoor @fit boot camp thing.

Even some of the more brainless triathlon brigade are getting into @fit. The mentality has a similarity - the cult of injury. The tri crew like looking at photos of themselves running with a grimace, as if in the movie Blackhawk Down, but they don't like the fact that they look like POW escapees when they're down on the beach. So they take to @fit as an avenue for getting (looking) stronger.

There's even a gym here now catering specifically for triathlon @fitters (or @ fitter who compete in tri, its hard to tell). That gym is doing pretty well, despite a very saturated market. The owner who is championing the thing certainly looks the part, but is actually neither triathlon fit nor very strong.

@fit has simply combined camaraderie and 'purpose' to turning up at the gym. As he said, it has given endless gym visits a metric... People want to be told, and have a culture standard to conform to. The non scaling thing IS the reason its popular... People don't care about being shit at something, as long as they don't have to decide on their own goals and have a culture to feel part of.

The camaraderie aspect works big time. Remember when going to a gym meant spitting at people to keep them away from the equipment you are in the middle of using. That's why @fit sells so well to women... It placates the tend and befriend aspect of feminine drives, in a distorted world of superficiality, social hysteria and feminism gone wrong.

@fit, where everyone gets to hang out in their teenage brain. And let's face it, most other aspects of media/society reinforce that happy stupid place.

[JamesonBushmill]

I bet he nailed her. 7th kid? Awesome

at least one of those was with Nicole, no?

[Koko, Beware]

That moment at about four minutes into the video where he walks the hot reporter into a darkened room where, surprise, there's a hot blonde in booty shorts doing cleans...I mean, jeez. He's a genius at something.

[The Ginger Beard Man]

I just watched it for the second time, this time with my girlfriend, who is a journalist by trade. She said the piece was basically a big reporting fail.
At about 3:30 she made me pause the video. The reporter had just asked if everything else in fitness was wrong until now, and he said yes.
"You can't let him say that and not ask a follow up."
At the end, well, she said a lot, and I can't remember most of it. But she says, "I don't know a lot about crossfit, but after watching that piece, I still don't know anything. Except that he's very quotable."
Also, there were at least seven or eight stories she could have focused on and covered, but she didn't cover anything.

[OCG]

At the end, well, she said a lot, and I can't remember most of it.

Well, get her to write something then.

[Mickey O'neil]

I hate him, and @fit, so much.

[Mickey O'neil]

double post

[Turdacious]

I was told by someone in the system that he didn't get the vaccine because his father thought it was a plot. If it is not true, i apologize, but Greg is my age...we don't get polio in our generation.

His father is Crossfit's Chief Scientist. Why @fit doesn't get more grief for daddy's position from the @fit crowd is beyond me-- I thought denying man-made climate change was beyond the pale.

[Protobuilder]

I dare anybody to find the polio reference before recently. Any previous mention of the limp included either a story about a gymnastics injury or that it occurred from demonstrating one of the many safe exercises in the @fit arsenal.

I did find somebody on another board mention that it was like a limp caused by polio.

Personally, I would have thought they would have gone with wrestling a bear or getting injured in a super-secret black op operation rather than a disease that was all that eradicated before he was born.