Yesterday I was surfing the web and stumbled upon a CNN article discussing the rise of wrestling in Senegal. What the article didn’t really dive into was some of the amazing pictures showing the athletes exercising.
If you didn’t know, Senegal is a country in Africa that is located on the Northwest of the continent. It has a 51 percent poverty rate. There aren’t a lot of fitness clubs, and the only one I really found was the Olympique Club in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The club is actually very beautiful, but its fitness equipment isn’t what we would stock up with in the U.S. However, they do use Les Mills for Group X.
These wrestlers work hard and exercise regularly, lifting weights and holding group classes on the beach. However, the weights that they lift have been created with equipment they’ve put together from spare car parts and other dismantled machines.
The top wrestlers in the country are reportedly making $200,000 per contest. This is an extravagant amount of cash considering the economic level of most in the country. With that, men are showing up in droves to compete and exercise.
In America we struggle to battle the obesity epidemic, but in Senegal they are creating their own gyms, much like what we’ve heard from early gym operators. They are exercising and getting stronger by any means necessary.
Do you believe the majority of your members would find a way to exercise if they didn’t have gyms? Where would the obesity rate be if gyms didn’t exist at all and people had to figure out how to create fitness equipment on their own? This was a great piece of motivation. Give the article a little time today and enjoy flipping through some of the pictures. These guys are really working hard.
Tyler Montgomery is the Editor of Club Solutions Magazine. Contact him at tyler@clubsolutionsmagazine.com
