把生活节奏调整得慢一点

Slow Down the Pace of Your Life

> By Li Xiaolai · 2007-03-30 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113101057/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/49.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

When I was 32, I started going to the gym as regularly as I could, although there were a few breaks in between. What kept me going at first was not that I had willpower, but fear—I had moderate fatty liver; the doctor's words scared me: "Only just past thirty and already moderate—what a pity……" [Translator's note: the original writes 吓找我了 ("scared-found me"), a slip for 吓着我了, "scared me"; translated by the intended sense] I knew perfectly well this was no terminal illness, but when I thought back on it a few hours later, the doctor's way of talking still brought me out in a cold sweat. I don't believe in any traditional Chinese medicine treatments, so I chose to go to the gym and exercise.

The business model of gyms has an especially amusing aspect. As you may know, a restaurant's revenue can roughly be calculated by multiplying two parameters, the price of the dishes and the number of tables; but if you calculate a gym's revenue in the same way—multiplying the annual membership fee by the number of machines—you'll surely feel that every gym must be losing money hand over fist. Yet in fact, building a gym takes no small investment, even a very high one; and at present it's hard to find a single gym in all of Beijing that loses money.

Once I chatted with a trainer, and it roughly confirmed my guess. Going by the numbers, members who, after paying the annual fee, keep it up for less than two months (which is really only 8 weeks) make up more than 95% of all members—and this is already a very conservative estimate. And the members who, surprisingly, do keep it up for two months often can't possibly manage to go every day.

Far too many people who go to the gym and pay the annual fee are actually just expressing a good wish. If these people go to a mid-range gym, at current Beijing prices the annual fee is about 4800 yuan. As a result, many people do the sums at the end of the year: they went 6 times in all, so each visit cost 800 yuan! So gym members rarely renew their contracts for a second year, but the gyms' sales reps don't worry about this, because the same kind of crowd comes in wave after wave and never runs out.

Among the 5% of members who keep it up, there are many people like this: they go once or twice a month, or once every one or two months. [Translator's note: the original writes 以两个月 here and later in 通常要经过以两个月的适应, a slip for 一两个月, "one or two months"; translated by the intended sense] The amusing thing is that these members rarely benefit from working out—because they go far too seldom—but they usually do renew in the second year; the number who renew in the third year, however, is close to zero.

At the gym many people come and many people go, but very, very few people keep at it. The real figure may give you a fright: in a medium-sized gym, the people who keep at it year-round are less than two in a thousand of all members. If you're someone who keeps at it year-round, what you see most often at the gym are faces putting on a show of seriousness. So much so that, after a while, whenever you see someone wearing a serious expression, you really can't help laughing inside, because you know this is a face you're almost certain never to see again.

At the gym, do you know how to tell at a glance who has been keeping at it for a long time? The simplest way, of course, is to look at their physique. But the most amusing and also most effective way is to observe their expressions. The expressions on these people's faces are calm, unhurried and relaxed, yet focused. They do a long warm-up, then go through that day's workout regularly, and add a fairly long cool-down.

I often observe why so many people can't keep it up—even though they have good wishes, just like the few who end up keeping it up. The first possibility is that at the beginning they trained too hard all at once—so hard that not just they, but in fact anyone, couldn't keep it up. For example, running is the most effective way to burn fat, but most people run the wrong way. As soon as they get on the treadmill they set the speed above 65 and pound away for all they're worth; within 10 minutes they're out of breath, and they jump off and hang on to the handrails, panting and wiping off sweat. In fact, in roughly the first 20 minutes of aerobic exercise, what's consumed is often only water; only after 30 minutes does fat start to be burned. But running the way they do will never be effective—apart from being very tiring. Of course, the fact of being "tired" creates an illusion: "I've been working hard."

The correct way to run for fat loss is to jog. Jog until you're slightly out of breath, then switch to brisk walking, and when your breathing has evened out switch back to jogging. That way it's easy to keep going to 30 minutes, and then, in the following 10~15 minutes, if your stamina allows (usually it takes one or two months of adjustment), run as fast as you can, or at least at a somewhat higher intensity than the first 30 minutes, so as to burn more fat.

Other things in life are often the same. The reason many people can't stick with their plans to the end is that their plans are actually "superman plans"—"mission impossible." I often see students' plans saying "memorize two hundred words a day," "write five English essays a day" or some such. Such intensity, for someone just starting out, is merely "seemingly feasible." In a world where everyone is in a hurry, wanting to slow down is a really hard thing. But what you should remember is: everything worth doing is worth doing slowly—doing for a long, long time.

So why do so many people go all-out right from the start? When we were very young, the PE teacher told us the technique for long-distance running: start sprinting only in the last 100 meters. But it seems this kind of principle is no use at all even when explained clearly—otherwise why would so many people do things the other way round—they often sprint the first 100 meters, and then simply stop running.

The explanation I've seen at the gym is this: these people often decide to exercise only when they have no other choice. The trainers I know often complain to me that their members have too many unrealistic ideas. The trainers put it like this: "In theory, however long a person took to accumulate that fat, it will take roughly the same time to burn it off." So if a person started putting on weight at twenty-five, and when he comes to the gym at thirty-five has forty jin of fat on him, and then asks the trainer to help him lose that fat within three months, he's either gone mad or is talking in his sleep. [Translator's note: jin (斤) is the Chinese unit of weight, 0.5 kg; forty jin is 20 kg] Of course, working a bit harder, you can shorten the ten years to five, or even two or three, but it will certainly be many times longer than those clueless people imagine.

This explains why so many people always fantasize that there's some "quick-fix" method—because they slacked off for too long earlier, and now suddenly find there isn't enough time and the deadline is about to arrive, so they can only pin their hopes on the existence of a "quick-fix" method. [Translator's note: the original writes 只有能寄希望 ("only have can pin hopes"), a slip for 只能寄希望, "can only pin their hopes"; translated by the intended sense] If you've ever had a similar illusion, don't be surprised; most people are like this. It is almost everyone's nature. And this nature makes people end up running themselves ragged, and so the fast-food industry has also indirectly, as a result, flour-

ished; this nature has also made countless training institutions form a huge industry parallel to so-called formal education; this nature has made diet pills a huge vertical industry—every year more than ten thousand new diet pills come onto the market worldwide, and after every one of them without exception is proven ineffective, next year even more of the same products will come onto the market, and sell even better…… [Translator's note: the source text breaks this paragraph in the middle of the word 蓬勃 ("flourishing"); the break is kept]

So the right strategy should be: find ways to foresee in advance what skills you will need, then, after making sure it's a skill you can truly master through practice, draw up a long-term plan and carry it out bit by bit. This is not, and cannot be, a unique insight of mine alone. In fact, many people have already told you the same principle: "Don't wait until the opportunity comes to find you're not prepared," or "Opportunity always favors those who are prepared." [Translator's note: the original writes 有准备好了人, missing 的; translated by the intended sense] And once you understand this principle, you'll truly examine your life and begin to wake up. After that, look again at the people around you who are busy, busy, busy and yet accomplish nothing, and you'll know how laughable they actually are, because all their lives they pursue things that in fact can't be obtained at all, and in the end they have only these ways out: either be disappointed with life, or choose some religion and pin their hopes on the next life. [Translator's note: the original writes 却有碌碌无为, a slip for 却又碌碌无为, "and yet accomplish nothing"; translated by the intended sense]

Copyright: © LookMinds. Our own edited text and translation, not a substitute for the original; rights in the original belong to the author and the platform. Please see the original link.