Making fitness mandatory.

So here’s a random fitness story for you. Recently the private christian university Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University has made it mandatory for attending students to wear fitbits. To make it even worse, students must purchase the fitness trackers out of their own pockets. Wow – talk about no nonsense.

Now we know what you’re thinking. This is a strict, nun – having, ruler spanking, christian university, these type of crazy things happen all the time. To a certain degree this is what they’ve signed up for. While private university definitely have more autonomy giving them space to make weirder rules, in this social media society there are no  isolated incidents. While it may seem far away now – one tweet (or article in this case) could change the game and soon the purchasing of fitbits could be as mandatory as papers and pens. Think about how long it took for cell phones to get popular, now combine that with the fact that technology moves about twice as fast as the year before. Exactly.

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So what implications could this have for University… nay, school goers in the future? While we love fitness here at Generation Iron and wish everyone would strive to reach their genetic potential, at the end of the day fitness is a choice. That’s what’s great about america – we can choose to get on that treadmill or say F@ck it! Now of course there are extremes like obesity or anorexia where there should definitely be interventions, but just being a lazy stoner should be a right.

Things like gym class are implemented and we, as most people, are in full support of that, however, this might be reaching a bit too far. It’s definitely a good idea to encourage healthy eating and let students know that fitness options exist but ultimately the decision lies with the individual. In a society of mandatory immunizations for the common cold, I think we can do without “the man” reaching into our heads for this one.

What do you guys think? Should Fitbit and other fitness trackers be mandatory? Let us know in the comments section below.