8 ms·
Moscow subway sells free tickets for 30 sit-ups
- vladgur 13y agoUnfortunately the article links to the wrong video. Link to actual youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojo9M1cPSPI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojo9M1cPSPI
- th0br0 13y agoThis is an amazing idea. Wish it would find widespread (global) use. (Although this would potentially lead to a completely subsidized transport system... but then you could increase the barrier to getting the free ticket or have the barrier depend on the person's physical fitness... and you might get the cost for the tickets back from the decrease in healthcare costs... it's just got so much potential!)
- nell 13y agoWe could channel charity money through ideas like this.
- fchollet 13y agoBut this couldn't be introduced in the US, and maybe not even in Europe. In the US you would definitely get instantly sued (and lose) for discrimination on physical fitness.
- th0br0 13y agoI don't think that there's any reason that as long as you offer means for paying cash you could be easily sued. That's speaking for Germany, at least. Sadly, I can imagine what such a lawsuit would look like in the US rather well :(
- Afforess 13y agoNot if you also offered a method to pay cash for the tickets. No discrimination then.
- cocoflunchy 13y agoI'm not so sure about that... what if you're a disabled person? What if you started giving free tickets to people who can do 60 sit-ups, or 100, instead of 30? Wouldn't this mean free tickets for men only (or mostly)?
- th0br0 13y agoSo give the disabled people a free ride (which, YMMV, they should be getting anyway and actually are already in Germany) As for the men-only part... enhance the system to not use a fixed number but have that number depend on the applicant's estimated gender, age, weight etc. You could even gamify this, gain money from selling people's user statistics (ugh!) etc.
- anonymfus 13y agoDisabled have a free ride in Moscow metro. Elders have a free ride if they are registered in Moscow.
- DanBC 13y agoYou alter the activity for different disabilities. Someone unable to use their legs could do some lifting. Someone unable to use their legs or arms could do some encouraging yelling to other people. Don't let diversity scare you away from doing things - do them, but make best efforts to be inclusive.
- vidarh 13y ago> 60 sit-ups, or 100, instead of 30? Wouldn't this mean free tickets for men only (or mostly)? Why would you think that? Body weight exercises are generally easier for smaller built people to get good at. For one, it gets harder and harder to add more muscle as you get bigger, and secondly smaller built people have shorter distances to move. If it was limited by explosive strength, maybe, because it's harder for women to grow large muscle volume, but if you can do 10-20 plus, it's pretty much down to endurance beyond that point.
- dhruvkaran 13y agoWhat if you generated electricity and stored it into a battery and then the transit system just paid an equivalent amount for the electricity?
- femto 13y agoOr you could set up a treadmill, and you get a kilometre of free train transport for every kilometre you walk on the treadmill. Call it performance art.
- jacalata 13y agoInteresting idea, but I don't think many metro systems are set up to easily sell 'a kilometer' of transport?
- eru 13y agoJust make it work out on average.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoI think you phrased this a little too glibly, but it's a very good point. You can tune two systems to have roughly the "exchange rate" that you'd like to see (unless each is highly sensitive to the other), even if there's not a direct point-for-points correspondence, but it's not necessarily easy to think of that.
- jacalata 13y agoDo you mean it's possible without changing the existing ticket systems, or that it's possible to adapt the ticket systems so it could work? For instance, the systems I've used sell tickets either by zone (unlimited travel within a region for x time) or by train station, where the difference between stations varies widely but the cost between stations doesn't.
- prawn 13y agoSet up an independent kiosk nearby that traded exercise (under the guise of energy generation) for free tickets.
- king_jester 13y agoThe better choice is to just subsidize the transport system and forget stupid gimmicks about getting free tickets.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoHm. Somebody doesn't like to exercise.
- jdmitch 13y agoAccording to the BBC coverage of this story(and what is actually shown in the video), it was squats rather than situps: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24873180 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24873180
- moocowduckquack 13y agoThis sort of thing could be put to good use, for instance if they installed massive ranks of bicycle generators, they could let people get tickets by actually powering the trains.
- dchichkov 13y agoThey've used to do that kind of thing in the past http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga
- moocowduckquack 13y agoI was thinking of Charlie Brooker's version from Black Mirror.
- sn41 13y agoI think we are rediscovering civilization :) Before long, people would realize - hey! cattle are even stronger than humans. We will have horse-drawn carriages in the near future. :)
- colinbartlett 13y agoThere already is the little old lady in the booth at the bottom of every escalator in the Moscow subway. Isn't she on a bike powering the escalators? :)
- DanBC 13y agoI went to Moscow in 1986. I was yelled at by one of those little old ladies because I made the mistake of trying to take a photo of the (beautiful) underground station. I hope someone (Google maps?) will eventually get around to documenting these and other stations.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoSorry for your poor experience. You can make photos in Metro for a few years now, and it's official. I think there are extensive sets of stations' photos somewhere on the net (Wikimedia commons?) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Taganskaya-Koltsevaya http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Taganskaya-Koltse... , for example
- jakejake 13y agoWe have a penalty system at work if you break the build or cause the music to skip, or any number of other frivolous "office infractions" you have to put a buck in our tip jar which is used to buy beer. If you don't want to pay the buck, though, you can optionally do 20 pushups instead. So far only one person has opted for the pushups though.
- eru 13y agoMake it one pushup for first infraction, and increase by one for each infraction by the same person. (Gives you a nice progression. A key to physical fitness.)
- yetanotherphd 13y agoThat sounds suspiciously like brogramming to me. You must donate $20 to the Ada Initiative as a penalty for your non-inclusive work culture. Or alternative, do 50 lunges.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoI quite like this comment. But it appears we are in the minority. :)
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoI don't get it. Are women supposed to be averse to pushups? Maybe you haven't met my sister; she runs marathons and is a Soo Bahk Do black belt. Pushups: no problem.
- jakejake 13y agohaha, yea sadly we're about as far from bros as it can get. Of our two girls in the office - one of them is far more crass than any of the guys!
- diziet 13y agoMy co-founder and I probably did on the order of 10,000 pushups each in the first half year of our startup over bets like that.
- glomph 13y agoI envision people standing there doing squats all day churning out tickets and selling them/asking for change.
- grinich 13y agoI wonder what would happen if a city's homeless population suddenly became ultra fit?
- DanBC 13y agoSee also "The Heavy Lifting Mule Women of Melilla". If you can carry goods over the border between Melilla and Morocco on your back you don't have to pay import duties. So, women queue up to carry the goods over for you, for a small fee. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24706863 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24706863
- vidarh 13y agoA year or so ago, there was a thread on r/fitness about this group of people who had tried to do 1000 kettlebell swings a day for 10 days, and it turned to a discussion of whether it would even be possible to do this for squats or other exercises. So I decided to try. I managed to put in about 400 a day, and I think I reached 600 one of the days. I'm an amateur power lifter. My squat max is about 190kg, and I do about 80 or so weighted reps on my squat days, ranging from 70kg on the lightest warmup set up to about 160kg x 5, and 5 sets of 10 at 80kg. That feels like nothing compared to doing 400 body weight squats per day. The soreness and burn was just terrible, but worst was the demotivating effect of knowing you have still more sets (I varied my sets between 25 and 100 reps; ~35-50 seemed to be optimal for me in getting as many done as quickly as possible) I'd like to try a high rep program again (probably not that high) for a few weeks to see how it works during a cut, as that was the original purpose of the kettlebell experiment mentioned, but the brutal effect on motivation is not something I look forward to.
- kitd 13y agoTo be fair, as a powerlifter, I suspect you are highly adapted to maximising peak power, rather than prolonged power over 400 - 1000 squats. I would think that anything above 100 largely becomes an endurance exercise which requires a very different adaptation. As a 48yo rower, I can do IRO 300 squats before feeling the burn too badly, but then I have been doing endurance-type training for the past 35 years. I have known lightweight rowers who were pretty much unlimited in the number they could do in 1 hit. Their only limit was needing to eat/sleep/etc!
- anonymfus 13y agoAs Russian I want to share my first association: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C-jcCWu31s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C-jcCWu31s Westerners could try to understand it by watching entire movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47CNxwlt9U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47CNxwlt9U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eti9Qn4bZDg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eti9Qn4bZDg
- prawn 13y agoHighly recommend everyone gets a copy of Kin-dza-dza (with subtitles, if necessary) and watch it. Very quirky and amusing sci-fi. Apocalyptic/alien exploration crossed with Les Visiteurs.
- anonymfus 13y agoAbove linked YouTube videos have English subtitles.
- colinbartlett 13y agoMosfilm, the huge Soviet-era movie studio, has published a sizable portion of their catalog for free viewing on YouTube: http://youtube.com/mosfilm http://youtube.com/mosfilm. A lot of them have English subtitles. Kin-dza-dza is indeed up there. Brilliantovaya Ruka (The Diamond Arm) is another favorite of mine available with subtitles. And perhaps the most popular is the holiday classic The Irony of Fate.
- JackpotDen 13y agoThanks very much for sharing
- penetrarthur 13y agoThe movie is about "some absurd country", which was a laugh at Soviet Union. A country that is developed enough to send shuttles to space, but on the other hand is an empty desert with overpowered police(in the movie they are called "ecilop"), dumb leaders that people worship etc. Movie is definitely a must-see.
- everettForth 13y agoI'm all for promoting physical fitness, but this seems like discrimination against elderly / disabled people.
- 3pt14159 13y agoWell public healthcare is discriminatory towards elderly / disabled people so that should balance that out.
- RKearney 13y agoI see no problem with promoting good health. There are plenty of elderly people who can do sit-ups. People who weigh over 350lbs eat free at Heart Attack Grill. Are they discriminating against non-obease people?
- baddox 13y ago> Are they discriminating against non-obease people? Yes. It doesn't get any more straightforward than that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- king_jester 13y agoDoing a round of sit-ups != good health.
- salilpa 13y agoindian railways please implement this in india. we have a sizable obese population who would do anything to get a free ride. health and money at one go. so much win
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoThis whole idea is pretty weird. Not surprising it comes from Russia. It is very reminiscent of the idea promoted both by the Nazis and communists that citizens should be fit for the state.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoHow is it any weirder than forcing people to purchase financial services that pay for medical treatments, something that most countries do? Once you make people's health a collective responsibility, it hardly seems unreasonable to demand that people maintain fitness. I just wish they didn't do situps. Situps are terrible for your back. There are so many better options - just make people hold a plank for a minute.
- hrkristian 13y agoIt was probably one of the easier exercises to monitor automatically, I should think a camera is less prone wear&tear than a pressure mat for planking... There is also hygiene to think about, not in the sense of an actual concern, but in the sense that people will be more averse to lying face down on a mat used by maybe hundreds of people every day. I do agree with your sentiment BTW, here in Norway there's been quite a bit of talk about similar programs through the years, but there are just too many pit-falls on the way, usually doesn't even get past the "Rights for X" organisations' whining.
- salilpa 13y agowell. its an optional thing. no one is forcing anyone. its good to have that choice
- gcb1 13y agoevery crazy dictator is found of eugenics.
- marquis 13y agoNo points for climbing those stairs when the escalators are down? They are the deepest subway I've even been in (also the most beautiful, goes without saying).
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoPoints for running them! Also hopping up one-legged. Like by son's Tae Kwon Do national team did for conditioning.
- cdurr 13y agoThis is fatshaming. Thin privilege is getting free subway rides. thisisthinprivilege.tumblr.com (couldn't resist)
- elementai 13y agoI suppose it wont last long past Sochi-2014 Olympics.
- gaius 13y agoIn the French Foreign Legion they have l'aperitif, which is that you do 10 chin-ups before entering the mess hall. SWMBO has vetoed me instigating a similar policy for our dining room.
- QuasiAlon 13y agoAnother example to something in this realm comes from Brazil, where you can cut time from your prison sentence by riding bikes. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/12/stationary-bikes-get-brazilian-prisoners-closer-to-freedom http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/12/stationary-bi... and yea, totally Black Mirror S01E02. The best one imho.