JAWZRSIZE!

Hello, everyone. I've gathered you here to learn about Jawszrsize. It is the most maniacally stupid piece of workout equipment I have ever seen. 

You think, surely, that I'm being hyperbolic? Friends, I could wade through 500 words describing this thing, which is basically a piece of rubber the size of a garlic bulb. I could! But I think it's easier to get out of the way and show you this (real!) screenshot from Jawzrsize's website. Keep in mind that this is what the owners of Jawzrsize presumably think a cool guy looks like.

"Think about it," Jawzrsize's website asks, which is probably its own workout for people buying these things. "There are 57+ muscles in your face and neck. That's 57+ muscles you've most likely never put through a proper workout. Every year, people contribute billions to the cosmetic industry restructuring their faces through surgery injections that don't last. They've tried everything - or so they think."

You get the idea. For $30 plus shipping you can be the kind of terrifying freak with a 10,000-yard stare who, uh, chews really hard? On a plane? Near other people? Fellas: your Very Normal Girlfriend, who is inexplicably telling us to hang loose, will also find it cool! Isn't that neat? 

If this product is incomprehensible to you, it's probably because your relationship with exercise is healthy. You have not gotten extremely fit, and like Alexander the Great, wept for more lands to conquer. You also have not risen in the morning and hated the shape of the face you see in the mirror, which is a much more sobering — and much more common — kind of feeling. 

I have been thinking about Jawzrsize quite a bit recently, because it’s merely the weirdest corner of the much larger Fitness Industrial Complex, which is practically banging down your door amid quarantine and shuttered gyms to ask you where your wallet is. This army of marketers are always concerned with something that is wrong with you, like a mean great-aunt, which is why they’re all such a bad ambassadors for fitness.

Each one of them offers you a unique personality to wear while you go about paying them money to make yourself better. Are you looking to lose ten pounds before a wedding? Are you looking for a squarer jaw? Would you like to go faster on race day? If so, follow me! The goal might be the same, but the way you’d like to feel while doing it is down this aisle.

"Hard to Kill" fitness, which sells a range of workout products and programs, is precisely this kind of operator. The company, founded by a military veteran, promises to make you a better "warrior." In offering admission to a "brotherhood," it presumes you are a man. The bold and italics are entirely theirs, which I like to imagine is being shouted to me on a hot afternoon by a drill sergeant:

“We demand discipline, determination, comradeship and hard work, some of the values that are lost in modern day society.”

That's an odd dash of political commentary from a fitness company, isn't it? If we read on, we learn that "we need more warriors in today's society." I suppose if we buy these "raw" workout plans, we'll  be ready "both mentally and physically…so you can face the challenges head-on with a new found confidence."

This is not the promise of fitness: it’s the promise of the respect of your peers, packaged within a military worldview. I do not doubt that you can build muscles with the HTK fitness plans. But if this kind of marketing works on you, are muscles really what you're looking for?

Planet Fitness, far more famous than HTK, has adopted precisely the opposite pose, though I’m not sure I prefer it. Their purple-bathed “Judgement-Free Zone” assumes your insecurity in a gym from the start. This is no doubt true for many people — though presuming that exercising outside a Planet Fitness must be intimidating is self-serving and false.

One of my favorite essayists is E.B. White, who wrote a very lovely piece in 1963 about his fondness for sailing, which he developed over his entire early life. There is a line that I return to constantly when I think of exercise. 

"Sailing became a compulsion," he wrote. "There lay the boat, swinging to her mooring, there blew the wind; I had no choice but to go."

I have been working out, pretty hard, for about a decade now. I led my college triathlon team before I got big into running and, now, weightlifting. I am not talking out of turn, but my credentials are besides the point, of course — and I think if you've scrolled this far looking for them then you're missing the point.

When I am sweating, I am not thinking about my taxes or my editors or my heating bill. I am practicing, in a vaguely monastic way, a ritual — centered on my faith that tomorrow, I will be stronger; when I wake up, my mind will be clearer.

That probably sounds pretty self-serious, and I guess it is! But it’s perfectly O.K. to do pull-ups and just enjoy the challenge and the feeling of success. You don’t need an ex-military guy to shout at you to work harder. And you don’t need to feel bad that you’re not where you’d like to be yet.

Of course, I can't speak to your experience, nor your tastes. If you'd like a firmer jawline, rest assured: they've made something for that.