Gyms are weird

Gym bodies: a healthy goal, the ultimate class signifier, an oddity of late stage capitalism, or all three?

I was a late-comer to exercise. At primary school, I was too awkward to physically engage with any confidence, and at high school, I was too much of a ratbag to consider sports. I was too busy smoking cigarettes and getting into trouble.

In my 20s, I realised that my body was starting to reflect my lifestyle, and vanity took over. I started running in an effort to keep my weight under control, and it didn’t take long until I was hooked. I channelled my little addict brain away from smoking and partying and chased the dopamine high that came from a sweaty trot around the streets instead. I was quickly hooked. I went from my first 5k to my first half marathon in just a few months, and by 30, I was running marathons.

Here’s me joyfully completing my first marathon in 2018, shortly before I turned 30 and my ankles fell off.

In the last few years, I’ve done less running (injuries, man) and I’ve been swept up in the HIIT trend. F45 has become my exercise drug of choice, which is handy given how ubiquitous studios have become across New Zealand and Australia, while I travel around for work.

Last week, I was on holiday in Gold Coast, and bought a weekly pass to the closest studio to indulge my daily fix.

All F45 studios across the globe operate on the same weekly schedule, but each have their own unique characteristics. Some trainers are more useful than others, and the people who turn up tend to tell you something about the area.

My home studio is a commuter gym, and there’s friendly chat and a pretty calm atmosphere. Not a lot of posturing going on. The central Auckland studio I sometimes go to, in contrast, has more in the way of Botox and boob jobs, and the trainers have Madonna microphones.

The studio I went to on the GC last week was somewhere in between - small and friendly, but with a noticeable trend toward sleek matching workout outfits and trainers who enjoyed showing off their own abilities in between sets.

Mid-workout, I found myself distracted by all the attractive bodies encased in matching activewear (yes, I’m a creep) and went off on a thought spiral, thinking about how weird it was that these people were so ripped.

Once upon a time, rippling muscles were surely the domain of people who had physical jobs. You know, cutting down trees, tilling fields, lifting tyres, that sort of thing. (I’m aware of how limited my knowledge of pre-industrial work is here, but bear with me.)

But these days, office workers and retail salespeople across the globe can sport cut abs and firm, toned arms way out of step with the reality of their daily lives. For an hour a day, we dutifully head into a brightly-lit indoor studio and sweat, lift and do burpees on the spot as nightclub music pounds from the speakers and personal trainers shout encouragement. When we’re done, we swill a protein shake, pack a macro-optimised lunchbox and then… sit down for 9 hours in front a computer screen for a long day at the email mill.

Our occupations and lifestyles mean we should probably be all quite plump, pale and short-sighted, but capitalism has found a way to bury the truth of our egregiously unhealthy, unnatural lives - gyms! Thanks to 5am fitness classes, we can circumvent our sedentary reality with an additional scheduling and performance requirement.

Unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of money to be made in the quest for fitness. HIIT classes like F45, Orange Theory and CrossFit all promise maximum results, in minimum time, with very little thinking required - and the price tag can run to hundreds a month. The fitness aesthetic is a capitalist dream, too. Matching outfits and supplements are the order of the day, dressed up as wellness and self-care.

If you can’t swing the expensive classes, you can buy a cut-price membership to a 24 hour gym… which gives you the terrific option of giving up some sleep to stand on a cross-trainer or do some lat pull-downs overnight. Yikes.

Being fit has become the ultimate class signifier, in the same way that having a rotund belly used to connote leisure time in centuries past. Remember when the over-tanned look of the early 2000’s replaced pale skin as a wealth indicator? It used to be a flex to have skin untouched by the demands of physical labour. Then, it became a flex to show you could go outside and lie on a beach all day rather than work (but because most people actually couldn’t, you’d just fake it on a cancer-inducing sunbed instead). This is a bit like that. We want to look like we have physically demanding lifestyles… but not have them.

There’s some real mental gymnastics required here to make this all add up:

• Because of the demands of my job and lifestyle, I don’t spend enough time outside and doing manual labour to stay physically fit

• I pay for the opportunity to simulate the effects of manual labour by lifting heavy items in a different indoor environment

• I then pay others to complete jobs that might have actually helped with my fitness (gardening, housework, etc)

• There’s no way my actual life is enough for me to build muscle, but a sign that my life is successful is that I have built it anyway.

Just another day in the hellscape of late-stage capitalism, I suppose.

In summary:

Gyms are weird.

Tired, sedentary office workers who can deadlift 80kg are weird.

Rippling muscles on your barista are weird.

And given I’m still doing it, but creepily watching the people around me and running this internal dialogue at the same time, I suppose I’m pretty weird too.

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P.S. This is the first proper edition of Current Fad, my new Substack. If you’ve just found this and have no idea who I am - hello! It’s nice to meet you.

If you’ve been following me, or subscribed to Wednesday Wisdom, for the last few years - thanks for coming to see me here.

I don’t know the exact form my Substack life is going to take yet, but I’m a huge fan of the format. I intend to publish less ‘work-y’ stuff on Current Fad, and more general social/ cultural musings. I’ll be publishing every couple of weeks to start with.

I hope you enjoyed this insight into my brain.