Essay

Minimum pain, maximum gain

By Samantha Loong

There's a fitness trend currently taking over London's parks. A few of my friends have signed up for these "boot camp" training sessions, which usually involve some ex-army soldier or former high-ranking sergeant treating participants like they're new recruits. And sometimes the instructors even wear camouflage pants to give an even greater air of authenticity.

A true-to-life boot camp training session starts very early in the morning. Participants get barked at to go lower on their press-ups, faster on their sit-ups and higher on their pull-ups. There are benefits to this style of training of course, in that your body gets an all-round workout — after all, this sort of training works for soldiers.

One of the instructors at my gym likes to borrow from the school of boot camp training and use the tactic of humiliation for his weight-training classes. I'm assuming he thinks that this will motivate us, but I'm not sure the members of his class appreciate this. I made the mistake of attending his class once and was subjected to all sorts of sarcastic comments and embarrassment. One lady clearly found him as irritating as I did and left the session before it finished.

Some people surely do better at exercise when they're pressured, preferring the "no pain, no gain" approach. I, however, am a fairly lazy individual who likes minimum pain, with maximum gain. This approach is especially useful when it comes to language learning. Rather than set aside particular times when you study, make your target language the only thing you see. For example, I like to use a Japanese operating system on my computer, as it means that even without trying, I'm practicing reading Japanese. I go to a Japanese hairdresser not only because they are usually more used to dealing with hair like mine, but because they often have lots of Japanese magazines. And of course, I can speak to them in Japanese. Another simple way of incorporating your target language into your everyday life is to start by changing the home page of your browser so that it lands on a news site in that language. Or if you're into food like I am, visit recipe sites in that language and find a dish that you want to cook.

Training for anything, be it physical or mental, doesn't have to be strenuous. At university, a friend of mine was doing all sorts of painful, mind- and body-numbing exercises in order to enter the New Zealand Army. When a free hip-hop dance class was offered on campus, I suggested we give it a try. The moves, timing and physicality of the class were intense, but exciting and hilarious. By the end of it, as we were both keeled over and out of breath, my friend confessed that he found the class more demanding than any army training he had ever gone through. More evidence that, for me anyway, it will never be "no pain, no gain," but rather: more fun, more done.

Shukan ST: JANNUARY 6, 2012

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