Upside-down yoga is sweeping America, soon to set the gyms of the UK afire with the defiance of gravity. I was just scanning the internet for what, exactly, was good about it. On the website it says: "The AntiGravity Hammock acts as a soft trapeze, supporting you as you master simple suspension techniques leading to advanced inverted poses." So being upside down, in other words, leads to you getting better and better at being upside down. You can also get better at upside-down pilates, and the rather ominous-sounding upside-down dance.
On the one hand, I can't believe it will take off in Britain, because it is so extravagantly pointless, but on the other hand, for the same reason, I can't believe it won't. Faddy exercises are reason-proof, recession-proof and science-proof, insulated against any consideration of consequence that might otherwise ever stop anyone doing anything.
The year before last there was a fad for heated pilates. It was just like the regular kind, only you did it in a heated kennel, while someone outside it enjoined you to "Lose! Tone!" It was more soothing than it sounds. Perspex has a muffling effect. I had a go. "This," I thought, with a clarity that might have stopped my heart were it not for the lovely warm environment, "is the end of civilisation."
First, consider the manpower: a person to measure your fat bits with calipers, a person to shout at you through your kennel, a person to show you where everything was. Second, the hardware: the building itself, on a piece of Chelsea real estate surely worth millions (then, anyway), the echoey gym with its kennels; the funny chambers you sat in afterwards to cool down and make your fat bits wobble; the very idea that, somewhere, there must be factories positively engaged in devising these machines. And for what? A fitness improvement not discernibly better than regular, unheated pilates, which itself has only a very limited demonstrable use, for dancers with injuries and people with slipped discs; and everybody else, I bet you, is just doing it to get out of the house.
When I was at school, there was a version of calisthenics that, apparently, made you thinner the smaller your movements were, so that if you perfected an imperceptible butt clench, you may eventually disappear. The more outlandish and counterintuitive these crank exercises are, the more they seize the imagination, for the simple reason that any straightforward emphasis on the physical truths of energy-in, energy-out will ultimately have people running through the park and then doing 10 press-ups.
This doesn't cost anything. I wouldn't suggest that it's all a grand marketing conspiracy - the loon-fitness industry is nothing like cohesive enough to pull that off. No, people like spending the money because everyone dislikes spending the effort, and the two things are on a metaphorical par - the rest of our lives are, after all, mainly engaged in swapping effort for money. Don't make it cheaper. Make it even more expensive. That way, I might not even need to stand up.
There's a fat-buster website called The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust (Toast - yes, really), that says: "People told us that they were finding the key message of just eat less and exercise more unhelpful." Well, no! How incredibly mulish, to say a true thing, without gilding it at all with a line about heated pilates. Bald truths are tedious: it is the human condition to be always looking for a workaround. That's an attractive trait, isn't it, the problem-solving? Likewise the belief in metaphor; the ability to substitute the two very different concepts of cash and toil. But if the endpoint of all this is doing yoga upside down, then we really have disappeared into an eddy of senseless, gullible vanity. And it doesn't even make you thin.
