Paul Scott, one of the brightest guys writing about health and fitness for magazines today, has a terrific takedown of the health-club industry in the current issue of Best Life. Paul and I have emailed off and on for the past two years, and I know this is a subject he's been pursuing for a while. In particular, he's asked a lot of questions about the predominance of exercise machines, as you can see in this passage:

This, though, is my favorite part:

That's as good a summary of my fitness philosophy as I've seen.

In my idle moments, I used to think about how I'd recreate the modern health club, if I had a chance to start over from scratch.

I decided that the first thing I'd do is set up an area where you can do the two best total-body exercises in the world: push heavy things, and pull heavy things. So you set up perhaps a half-dozen cars on fixed, parallel tracks. You have a Mini Cooper on the first track and an SUV on the last one, with four intermediate-weight cars in between. The tracks are set up so you can either push the car from one end of its track to the other, or you can strap on a harness and pull it. There'd also be a rope, so you could stand at one end and pull the car to you, tug-of-war style.

I'd have climbing ropes and nets as well, going from floor to ceiling.

Next I'd have a room set up for throwing heavy things up to the ceiling, down to the floor, or anyplace in between.

I'd also have jumping platforms and pits, and tracks for sprinting.

But my favorite part of the operation would be the group-exercise classes. All would be based on actual sports skills. So instead of running sprints just to be running sprints, in one class everyone would run pass patterns, and while you're resting in between routes you'd take turns throwing to your receivers.

The class would be different every time. You'd never know what sport you're going to do. You might run soccer drills, hit or kick heavy bags, practice lay-ups, play dodge ball ... the whole point would be to develop fitness in tandem with athletic coordination, but change it up often enough that even the best athletes sometimes feel like geeks and the worst athletes get a chance to feel like studs.

There wouldn't be a TV in the place, and only doctors on call would be able to bring a cell phone into the workout rooms. And even then, they'd only be allowed to talk on their phones in designated areas.

So that's my fantasy fitness center. What's yours?

Tuesday blog meat

• If you'd rather lose pounds of fat than thousands of dollars, these Yale professors have a weight-loss plan that just might work for you. (Hat tip: Greg Woods.)
• Modern life: It's bad for our kids' bones.