We’re in a time where we all have to start thinking ahead to keep our spending or consumption in check.  With energy, we have to become more efficient, starting with the little things that are easy to do.  With our health, we have to look at the real cost of not exercising regularly.

When I was an elementary school teacher (and not exercising much), I developed some upper and lower back pain that wouldn’t go away.  I started getting headaches all the time, to the point where prescription pain killers weren’t helping.  I was referred to a chiropractor, and my insurance covered 16 visits with $20 copays that I used up in about 2 months.  Once that benefit ran out, I was faced with the choice of paying out of pocket, or getting in shape.

My monthly bill for dealing with my back problems were somewhere around $200 ($160 – chiropractor, $20 – pain relievers, and $20 or more in beer!).  That’s $2400 a year!

I knew I needed to make a change, but wasn’t sure what to do, and I didn’t want to make things worse.  I knew I needed to grow up and stop acting like a 20 year old kid who could heal from anything.

After joining a gym and successfully completing a 12 week program involving weightlifting, cardio, and nutrition guidance, my neck and back pains were mostly gone, as were the knee pains that had been plaguing me for a couple years.

There’s more to the story, but the bottom line is, joining a gym and working with a personal trainer can save you a lot of money.  Yes, you have to pay for it up front, but it is an excellent hedge against paying a lot more down the road.

What Can I Power?

At Oregon gym, you burn calories, move electrons

(AP) – 6 hours ago

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Reddening, a rivulet of sweat running across her cheek, Amy McCullough hunched over the stationary bike, pumped her legs like crazy and began producing serious power — enough watts to run a flat-panel TV and a ceiling fan.

She thrust her arms upward and exclaimed: “Oh, 180!”

And, with that, her electrical output drooped. The generator attached to her exercise machine slowed, and the digital readout from the device on the handlebars fell below 100 watts.

The transient burst was a personal best for the 43-year-old legal aid lawyer who works out five days a week at a storefront fitness center in north Portland where members on exercise machines fitted with compact generators can burn calories and generate electricity at the same time.

Their workouts satisfy a modicum of the electrical draw at the 3-year-old Green Microgym. More important, they satisfy a demand among its 200 members to be fit in a way that fits Portland’s green-indie-local ethos.

The 3,000-square-foot gym aims for a neighborhood trade. It features solar panels, recycled toilet paper, renewable-source flooring and lots of reminders on the wall about turning off lights, fans and TVs.

“I was really attracted to the idea that it would be green,” said McCullough, who joined shortly after the gym opened in 2008. “I could go in and generate electricity. How cool is that?”

It has occurred to many exercisers during long stretches on machines that it would be cool to turn sweat into watts. In recent years, a few tinkerers and entrepreneurs have brought the idea to market.

So far they have but a teensy sliver. The two leading startups sell equipment to retrofit existing bikes and elliptical trainers, and each reports hooking up about 1,000 machines. An executive of one company estimates that American fitness centers house 8 million to 10 million machines that could generate power.

They don’t, though. Like much in energy that’s efficient or alternative, from plug-in cars to compact fluorescents, initial capital outlays are steep. Absent a subsidy, or a quantifiable green marketing rationale, the returns on investment don’t come quickly, if at all.

Kurt Broadhag, a Los Angeles consultant to health clubs and an advocate of greening them, says it appears the payback period for electricity-generating exercise equipment is about 15 years — two to three times the machines’ life span.

“The only sense it makes is in educating people in taking care of the environment,” he said.

When Adam Boesel opened the Green Microgym in Portland’s artsy, gentrifying Alberta district, he figured on a market among people already educated about the environment.

The former teacher from Seattle looked at Portland, a city that, when cut, bleeds green. It’s regularly in top 10 lists for bicycle and mass transit commuting, recycling, composting, energy-efficient buildings and so on.

“When I was researching Portland businesses, they all were talking about sustainability — all the good ones,” he said.

He’s gotten a lot of publicity about the technology — helpful for a business that opened on credit-card financing a few weeks before the economy tanked.

But the machines, he said, are “just the shiny wrapper on a package, which is energy efficiency,” something gym members such as Martha Jones take seriously.

“Whoops, I have to turn off the lights,” she said at the end of an interview in the gym’s basement studio, dashing back inside.

Prominent in the gym are signs that explain how to use the individual, adjustable controls for lights and fans. A wall-mounted button connects to a remote device that allows the cable boxes to be shut down, not just put on standby and using 29 watts when the flat-panel TVs are not in use.

Jones is an Intel engineer who likes seeing her workout quantified in watts. But it’s not primarily the electricity that attracts her to the Green Microgym.

“It’s just really supportive,” she said. “If you have somebody who knows you, who knows your name, they will keep you moving. I know for sure I will cheat right and left on my workout without that.”

She counts hoofing it to the gym as warm-up and cool-down. “And I do more shopping in Alberta because I’m walking here,” she said. “It helps the local businesses.”

Boesel sees opportunity in such thinking. Emerging from what he called scary times in the recession, he’s franchised a second neighborhood gym in southeast Portland and plans to open a third on his own. With a Seattle partner, he’s getting into the manufacturing end, selling machines whose plugs feed electricity from the machine into a gym’s distribution system.

Theoretically, in states like Oregon with “net metering” rules, such machines could power the gym itself and feed excess energy into the grid, perhaps generating a utility bill credit. But that level of output would likely be rare, especially in big gyms heavy on lights, heating, cooling and other energy draws. Most often, electricity-generating machines would supplant some of a gym’s draw from the grid, a smaller savings.

Boesel said he doesn’t try to calculate how many kilowatt-hours the Green Microgym produces. “The payback period is irrelevant to me,” he said.

But the machines themselves and the potential they represent are “pretty cool,” he said. “It’s not inevitable that all the machines will make electricity someday. … It’s all going to have to be pushed along. That’s what I think I’m doing.”

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

It was one of those rare and privileged times where I had the chance to reflect on how far we’ve come and how much potential we have for the future!

You can listen to it here: http://hybridliferadio.pagatim.fm/show-archive/the-green-microgym-pumps-up-the-grid/

1. “I’m for anything that helps the environment, so I fully support this type of equipment”
2. “It somehow feels better to make electricity than waste it when I’m exercising.  It takes away the guilt of working out indoors.”
3. “The workout is the same, so why wouldn’t I use this equipment?”
4. “It motivates me to workout more and harder.”
5. “I get an idea of how much energy it takes to create electricity, which reminds me to save energy in my daily life”

2. You get $30 in gift certificates to local restaurants, grocery stores, and shops

3. You get a $30 discount on fitness apparel online

4. You get $30 off your monthly health insurance premium

5. You get 30 hours closer to your wellness or weight loss goals

6. You get the satisfaction of knowing you’ve pumped 30 hours worth of electricity back into the building where you exercise

7. You know this is just the beginning, and you commit to exercising an hour a day forever!

This possibility is closer to reality than you might think.  Stay tuned!

I understand where the question is coming from.  If you are going to install solar panels or windmills on your house or building, you want to know the payback.  But what we’re doing is different than adding something to your building.

If you had two cars to buy that were exactly the same in every way, but one of them got better gas mileage, which would you go with?

If you had the choice between windows that were not energy efficient, and ones that were, and the cost was the same, which would you buy?

Ultimately, ours is a move toward sustainability, one sliver of a pie with many different ways to reduce our impact on the environment.  “Doing the math” is fine, but it doesn’t settle things either way, and whether we could power the world with human power isn’t the point.  The point is we’re making progress.  We’re a part of the solution.  We have a choice to waste energy or not, and we’re choosing to not waste it.