When I watched the original recently, three things caught me by surprise.
Super health club history scenes movie#
In movie after movie, Stallone had his favorite character push himself beyond human possibility, all for the chance to get his brain liquefied by the fists of Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago.īut if you’re judging movies by the quality of their training sequences, you can’t give a pass to any of the Rocky movies, including the first one. “In actuality, he would have lost his first match badly, walked away humiliated, been dumped by his girlfriend, and had to deal with the awkward silence between him and Mr. “The idea that someone with approximately six months of training could enter a full-contact black belt karate tournament is ludicrous,” says Ethan Benda, a trainer, bodybuilder and competitor in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. “That said, I find it highly improbable that washing cars, standing on a log on the beach and kicking into the waves will help you beat the defending All-Valley Under-18 champion – especially when he can beat your arse in a real fight.”Īny trainer would point out the absurdity of slow, repetitive movements – “wax on, wax off” – helping a martial-arts novice attain lightning-fast reflexes virtually overnight.īut it’s not just the stupidity of the training methods that riles up fitness pros. “I was 12 when I saw it the first time, and I can remember being blown away. “It’s an awesome movie,” says trainer Alwyn Cosgrove, who was a tae kwon do champion in his native Scotland before moving to the US. When I queried some of my favourite training and nutrition experts, several cited The Karate Kid (1984). How did that work? How would a single exercise – done all day, every day, with no time for recovery and who knows what maggot-infused gruel for nutrition – allow someone to live long enough to reach puberty, much less develop the physique of a champion bodybuilder?īut it’s not the worst offender. Somehow, that boy grows up to become Arnold Schwarzenegger. He and the other slaves apparently do nothing but push that wheel around and around. It starts with the slaughter of young Conan’s mum and their neighbours, after which he’s taken as a slave and chained to a gigantic wheel. The first time I called bullshit on a movie was the original Conan the Barbarian, which came out in 1982. For every inspired and inspiring workout sequence, there were several that made no sense whatsoever.Įven good movies included scenes in which the hero does exactly the opposite of what he’d need to do to get the results he ends up with.Ĭlick here to discover how Matt Damon got in the best shape of his life at age 45 The quality of those scenes was wildly inconsistent. It’s hard to say if it was a catalyst for the fitness boom that followed, or if it was just a coincidence that Baby Boomers found a passion for workouts shortly after it came out.īut it sure led to a lot of movies with training scenes. Rocky seemed like a turning point for my generation. The hero is the one we see working for everything he gets. He’s the guy whose incredible physique and boxing skill seem immaculately conceived. His opponent, Apollo Creed, is more like a traditional movie hero. Boxer Rocky Balboa is what fighters call a tomato can, a 30-year-old with no past glory and no future prospects … until he gets that one-in-a-million shot at the heavyweight title. When Rocky came out in 1976, we saw a genuine transformation.
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