Top 5 EH Excuses

Top 5 Excuses Guys Make

We’ve been at this F3 thing for a while now, so we’ve heard pretty much every excuse as to why a guy can’t come to a free workout with other guys at a time of day when the rest of the world is still asleep. Here, our choices for The Top Five Excuses men make to not give F3 a try

No. 1: “I need to get in shape before coming to an F3 workout”

This is No. 1 with a bullet on the F3 Excuse Charts. For a lot of guys it gives them all the wiggle room they need in their minds to try an F3 workout and to be honest, there’s really nothing you can do on your own that’s going to get you ready for that first workout. Almost no one working out in a gym or on the streets (let alone coming off the couch) combines the kind of aerobic and bodyweight fitness that F3 workouts demand. So you need to make the choice to join a bunch of other men and push through the pain. Because “I need to get in shape” is really just a way of keeping the commitment just over the horizon, always just out of reach. The only way to get in shape is to put yourself in the middle of a group of other men and force yourself to keep up with the Pack. The good news is…our Credo is that “We leave no man behind, but no man where we find him.”

No. 2: “I already belong to a gym.”

Hey, that’s great. I bet it really rockets you out of bed every morning to think about another exciting day on the treadmill, headphones plugged in so you can listen to the SportsCenter anchors run through yet another rendition of “Hot or Cold? Brought to You by Miller Lite” while the plastic ficus next to you waves gently in the 68-degree climate-controlled splendor. Meanwhile, elsewhere in your home city, men are gathering of their own free will in temperatures ranging from 9 to 90 degrees and conditions ranging from starlit to monsoon to sweltering to give it their all for an hour and launch into the day with power and impact. Trust us, there’s a difference.

No. 3: “That’s too early to get up to work out. I’m really not a morning workout guy.”

Oh, yeah…we know you. You’re the “Lunch Hour Workout Guy” until that 11 a.m. conference call runs long and you don’t have time to workout and get back for the 1:30 meeting, so you’ll have to run over to Chick-fil-A to grab some fast food that you can pretend isn’t “fast food,” but you’ll definitely get out in time to hit the YMCA before you go home except your wife calls and she needs you to go pick up your son from basketball practice so she can get your daughter from violin lessons and still get home in time to put dinner on the table and meet her friends for girls’ night out at 7:30 and, well… now you’re “Tomorrow Workout Guy,” aren’t you?

No. 4: “I’m already working with a personal trainer.”

Yeah, I can tell. Really getting your money’s worth there, aren’t you? And you’re paying this guy or girl how much to count your reps and hold a clipboard? Did I mention the Fourth F that comes after Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith? It’s called: FREE.

No. 5: “This sounds like some sort of cult.”

Back when our father’s fathers ran the world, a bunch of men gathering at odd hours to engage in common effort for the common good and with an eye toward the larger improvement of the world around them and the raising up of men to be leaders was simply plain vanilla, old-fashioned civic engagement, and it was what grown men did. If society has moved so far toward atomization and self-absorption that free assembly and group pride qualifies as cultish behavior, then so be it, but we will be the ones, in the words of the late William Buckley, standing “athwart history, yelling stop.”