Dear Nuffield,
What was wrong with the old field?!
I'm kidding. In actual fact, I applaud your promotion of healthy living. As a qualified nutritionist myself, I frequently try to prevent others from binge drinking.
I do this by going out and trying to drink all the alcohol I can find before anyone else can get to it, which I think we can agree is both noble and a shitload of fun. During one of these sojourns, I came across an advertisment for your health club that, I must say, I objected to.
Despite my heavy drinking, Nuffield, I like to stay in shape. I like running long distances and lifting heavy things, and whilst it's unfair to blame a health club for the decisions of marketing companies, your new poster pissed me off.
The poster, showing a monochrome image of a huge bicep, in an almost perfect mirror image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the promotional art for "Pumping Iron", bore the legend "That Picture You Have In Your Head Of Gyms. We're Not That."
Okay, fine, Arnold's is still bigger, but he is working right-handed, here...
What this tells me, through a stark image, is that you're the gym (or, rather, health club) for people who don't want to work too hard.
The image on the poster is over the top, sure, but who can honestly say that they don't want it? Who lifts weights, with the intention of getting bigger muscles, without thinking of the kind of huge arms on display in your poster?
In the same way, who runs on a treadmill in an attempt to lose weight without envisioning, in some secret part of themselves, a perfect, toned, slimline figure?
Your poster implies that you are the "health club" for the middle ground. For the people who only ever want to look average, rather than great - who want to achieve the bare minimum - and it speaks to a larger problem in society.
Many times over, I've heard people who either don't work out, or who exercise in a different discipline (eg: distance runners) claim that weight lifting and body building are only for the vain.
This is entirely a one-way street, incidentally. Bodybuilders and power lifters don't sit around bitching about marathon runners only doing it "to stay skinny," possibly because they're not insecure. It would be unfair to call distance runners and cyclists a bunch of spaghetti-armed pantywaists, so I won't, but I will, because they are.
When it comes down to it, every single thing that every person does is down to vanity. If you're reading this with clothes on, it's only because you're too vain to be naked. If you've ever run, or lifted a weight, or played a sport of any kind, or learned an instrument or any other skill, it's always been out of self-fulfillment and self love.
This is because anything in which a person can lose themselves - be it art, or music, or the zen of letting your body run while the mind wanders, or the focus of forcing a muscle through a hard rep to the silencing of all else - is a form of meditation, and this is essential to the upkeep of the human soul. People without hobbies - people without something in which to lose themselves - are the ones who are truly lost.
Because of this, nobody should ever judge another person when it comes to hobbies, or dreams, or ambitions. And for you to say that "We're not a gym where you can get huge muscles - we're a gym where you can embrace the mediocre" is to cut the balls off of everyone who ever struggled through their fist chin-up with dreams of looking like Arnold, or every fat person who really wants to work it off and be thin.
Like I say, Nuffield, I know individual branches aren't in charge of marketing, but get a grip. I go to the gym to work out. Not to play out, or to stretch out, or to lay out. Stop advertising yourself as the gym for people who aren't going to give it their all. Advertise yourself as the place that can make you look like this:
[Picture is of the one and only C.T. Fletcher. 54 years old, steroid-free.]
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