Ever since Instagram/Social Media encouraged narcissism, the whole “I go to the gym” thing has taken on an entirely different meaning. Health and a degree of vanity has been replaced with audience perception and bucket loads of vanity. These days, health rarely makes it to a podium finish unless it has a side effect of making you look ‘fabulous’.
Here’s what Andy Warhol once said about fame…
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
You’re only one viral-post or video away from that reality. I watched a video the other day by this guy on a new channel who was talking about why he avoids people. The net result was he unexpectedly went viral and already has 20,000 subscribers (Can I get a LOL)
When I first started training, going to a gym almost seemed ‘quite weird’ to most people and you hardly ever saw women in them either (not the case now). I remember one guy saying to me back then, “What are you training for?” as if to imply it must be for some kind of major event otherwise it wasn’t worth bothering.
This guy used to smoke 60 cigarettes a day and smoked even when he was shaving (he just used to move the cigarette to the other end of his mouth).
I was around 17 the first time I went to a commercial gym. I had to head all the way into town in order to go there and the regulars in that place weren’t very receptive to some 17 year old wannabe turning up at their temple of steel. One night someone pulled a gun on me at a bus stop I was waiting at on the way home so I sacked that off and started training at home instead.
Later I joined a proper gym closer to home. The guys in that gym were friendly enough but they were focused on the task at hand and I loved it there. We had a few characters in there as well. There was this bloke with a massive chest we nicknamed “The Barrel” and another one that looked like someone out of a 70’s porn movie, so naturally he was “The 70’s Porn Star”. It just so happens the barrel used to train with the porn star which made it seem like two minor gym celebrities had joined forces for a ‘collaboration’. In 2024 those two would be doing interviews on each others YouTube channels but this was before people could be arsed to upload anything online 😉
There was this other guy that would pick up 20kg plates with a couple of fingers like they were nothing. One day he hacked most of his finger off on a sliding hack squat. I remember him biting into his t-shirt to distract himself from the pain, then putting his finger under a tap as the water in the sink bowl turned claret red before disappearing unceremoniously down the plughole. I took him to hospital but he got sick of waiting so he drove back home in his truck with half of his finger hanging off and got it stitched up about 12 hours later. So ‘ard he may as well have been built in Scotland from girders.
That gym was a real spit and sawdust place by all accounts. I remember one day doing bench press and a big blob of water landing in my eye because the roof was leaking. It also wasn’t the most hygienic place to spend time in either but I only left there when the lease ran out and the owner had to close it down, which was a sad day.
I’ve since joined and attended a few different gyms. The trend in recent years has moved more towards people checking their phones in between sets and mainly doing arms. For some reason a lot of people think that training arms is doing ‘proper’ weight training and very few of them do compound movements to target larger muscle groups.
A few weeks ago I saw one guy in the gym with what appeared to be his girlfriend. He was doing barbell rows standing upright and dragging the weight awkwardly up to his mid section. It was a train wreck I was witnessing and gawd only knows what he thought he was training. His girlfriend was copying him, doing the same thing and the whole spectacle was cringeworthy. Gains or die!
You also get the jokers that have as much muscle on them as a dehydrated sparrow, telling you they are ‘cutting up’ for some holiday they are going on and going keto.
This is a bit of a sweeping statement but on the whole women in gyms (at least the gym I go to) train much harder than men. I don’t know why this is, but men (not all) just go through the motions in the gym, like it’s a time filler or something. You hardly ever see them training legs either and I know why. Because it’s f*cking hard (mentally you have to replace hard with the word rewarding)
Do you know what’s easy? Buying a protein supplement in a supermarket thinking it’s going to turn you into Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I used to get people asking me, “What’s the best protein powder” thinking it was a silver bullet solution. Here’s a secret: The best protein powder is boiled eggs (i.e. real food)
Nobody wants to hear, “If you want to build muscle you’ve got to fall in love with repetition and consistency. Oh and you’ve also got to bust your ass as well if you want to change your body composition to the point where anyone will notice.”
Women do train legs because they actually want results. A lot of men just want bulging biceps in a t-shirt as that ticks off some kind of box inside their head, in between checking the latest short attention span videos on TikTok. We live in strange times where people with stick thin arms and necks turn up with a tripod and a phone to livestream their workouts.
What are the viewers going to learn from that exactly? It’s all about the followers, fam. The first time I witnessed this happening I thought Jeremy Beadle was about, playing a practical joke or something. But no, these people are serious, they are really working out with their followers watching despite knowing as much about weight training as Boris Johnson knows about holding parties without anyone dobbing him in.
One trippy day in the gym there was a guy in there that had brought his own Olympic rings with him to perform what appeared to be ‘livestream’ manouvers in an area where regular people normally do cable crossovers.
He had a woman with him that periodically ‘popped, locked and dropped it’ in front of the camera which I think was to maintain audience interest in between his ‘Cirque du Soleil’ action sequences.
To be fair to him, he was considerably more impressive than Stick Thin Steve and his Iphone/Tripod combo but I still hate the way the livestreamers hog gym space so I’d wish they’d p*ss off.
At the end of thd day, people do whatever it is they want to do and not everyone wants the same thing out of the time they’re investing but don’t go around telling people you are a bodybuilder if you don’t train your legs. Saying, “Ooh I do running so I don’t need to train them” doesn’t fly.
Not many people like training legs, especially when the muscle soreness kicks in, but you sort of have to do it really and for that reason you have to face it head on if you train with weights or you might as well just go for a walk and do some press-ups instead.
For me, when I train I go to war with myself. I never take a phone on the gym floor and I’m there to train. Those phone messages will still be there waiting for you after your workout you know.
Next time you go to the gym, train your legs instead of your arms. I double dare ya! (Bonus points if you leave your phone in the locker where it belongs)