Insanity!

I have just seen the ‘infomercial’ for the Insanity workout for the first time, and I am afraid to say that to me it represents everything that is wrong with humanity. As such, and out of a feeling of empathy for the rest of my species, I am writing this open letter to Shaun T, John Congdon, Carl Daikeler, the actors used in the infomercial and Beachbody LLC in general.

It is painful to think that you guys are sitting pretty up there in California making millions off of selling lies to vulnerable people whilst real, honest, hard working people are struggling to feed their children.

Shaun T, how do you sleep at night? Oh wait, you obviously don’t, as the package includes free PERSONAL 24/7 support. Maybe that is another benefit of completing the programme you can add to the next revision of the advertising, that not only will you obtain the body that you always wanted but you will also eliminate the biological necessity for sleep and hence give yourself an extra eight hours a day to look in the mirror and admire your transformation?

It’s an injustice that there are people out there who are selling, or even giving away for free in most cases, legitimate health and fitness advice and yet they are relatively unheard of because they don’t have access to the $100 Million a year that you do for advertising. To name a few of the best (who I am by no way affiliated with):

 

Mark Sisson

http://www.marksdailyapple.com

Jamie Lewis

http://chaosandpain.blogspot.co.uk

Paul Carter

http://www.marksdailyapple.com

Chris Highcock

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.co.uk/

Ross Enamait

http://rosstraining.com/blog/

Please can you provide answers for or even simply try to explain how any of the following points are even physically possible:

• How it is possible to both build muscle and lose body fat at the same time? When one requires a calorie surplus and one requires a calorie deficit?
• How it has been proven that long periods of maximum intensity with short rest periods is an effective, healthy endeavor.
•  How men in their senior years have possibly put on so much lean muscle mass in such a short period when their testosterone levels, the principle hormone involved in such a process in men is at its lowest?
•  How it is possible to induce such hypertrophy with such limited recovery time?
•  Why is everyone in the infomercial good looking with a perfect smile? Is it because you have to have brilliant genetics for the programme to work, is it that you were exploiting the known psychological fact that people tend to put trust into people of that description or was it because they are all actors?
• Why is that the majority of professional athletes, who train almost 60 hours a week (more than the total duration of your whole programme), and have access to the best equipment, the best nutritionists and the best trainers that money can buy, still don’t look as good as the success stories that you show?
•  Is there a proven link between the amount of sweat lost through exercise and fat loss and increase in muscle mass as the infomercial seems to suggest?
•  How is it possible to receive such hypertrophic gains without the use of added resistance?
• Do you believe that any of the claims could be seen to be misleading to consumers in any way?
• Is there any scientific evidence to suggest that any of the claims are legitimate?

Please, please don’t just say to try it for myself and see the benefits, or that if I am critical of it then that is because I am scared of the insanity or not ‘Ready’ for it. Getting under a barbell for a new PR on the squat at a power lifting tournament is scary, not doing a set of burpees.

I was previously a subscriber to Hugh Everett’s Many-World Interpretation but after seeing your infomercial and not for the life of me seeing how that in any possible universe it would be acceptable to exploit people to such an extent, I think it is safe to assume that you have also managed to re-write the rules of quantum mechanics, another previously unseen benefit to the insanity workout.

I even checked out some of the reviews online to see what ‘real’ people had to say about it, but I couldn’t shake the disturbing thought that even these may have been fabricated. The prolific use of Americanized English and impeccable use of grammar on a UK distributors page is not very similar to other reviews I usually read, but they do have an uncanny resemblance to the language used in your infomercials.

It is tragic to think that we live in a world where in America in 1956, post World War 2 and the fall of Nazism and the dawn of the age of freedom, a world renowned scientist by the name of Wilhelm Reich had his whole collection of research into improving the quality of the Human life seized and destroyed by the US Government under the guise that it was ‘Fraud of the first Magnitude’. And yet, here we are in 2013 and Beachbody LLC, a company founded by two men who carved a career out of product marketing, is allowed to operate freely and I would dare hazard a guess, relatively tax free.

I would like to think that people would see this expose and someone somewhere will take it upon themselves to file a lawsuit against you and make sure that you return every penny back to the people that sold this product, but I fear that the most likely result will be that you will delete all reference to this and threaten me with a lawsuit for defamation of character. From the looks of some of the lawsuits you have threatened people with already, I would assume you have a good legal team.

Ross Enamait is an incredibly strong, fit and intelligent guy, and he seems to suggest as I do, that your claims are ‘optimistic’ shall I say.

I hope you don’t believe in Karma.

Carlitomoore.