It’s Not Working Out: Gyms Post-Lockdown
Gyms are not everyone’s cup of tea – or should I say, swig of protein shake. Poet laureate Simon Armitage captured this quite laconically in his poem Gymnasium, isolating in one image:
The loneliness
of dumb weights consisting only of weight.
The silent companionless scream of the castaway’s mind
in the bodybuilder’s head.
Hard-hitting and true, but not enough stop the exodus from the outside now that lockdown rules have slackened – along with our waists. Say what you like about gyms, they’re not as depressing as Sally Rooney’s Normal People – although they do share the same latent sexual energy. As a frequenter of gyms, it occurred to me that at times, they can be a little vexing. In what other life circumstance would you choose to look your worst amongst complete strangers, and not just willingly - you actually pay money for this privilege. The most galling thing of all is seeing the people on the treadmills do weird things like smile and chat to each other. I find that a visit to the gym is the same as a trip to the gynaecologist: it’s a little uncomfortable, interaction is strange and eye contact must be avoided at all cost.
Before lockdown, I mocked the scantily clad gym bunnies for their impeccable gym gear and terrifying ability to look great whilst exercising. My recent birthday present of a Gymshark gym set, however, made me confront my prejudice head on. After all, if you can’t beat them, join them. Like the isolated figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, after what felt like years of wistfully sighing when passing a closed gym, I decided to return to the place of wilderness, of unbounded opportunity and expanse. Except it wasn’t really like that at all. I queued to enter the gym through one of Dante’s lesser known circles of hell: the plastic tube. Those of you who have visited a PureGym will be no stranger to the dystopian glass column through which it is impossible to pass without the anxiety that you’ll get stuck in said tube like a sweatier Augustus Gloop, vulnerable to the humiliation of others.
When I arrived to the gym, already sweaty with anticipation, it was like everyone else had never left. Everyone was impossibly athletic, making mockery of the fact that the rest of the world had been getting softer in quarantine. Being in the gym is like being in Vietnam, except with a lot more protein shake and instead of the Vietcong, the steroided gym-lads wait to ambush you, collecting around your machine until you admit emotional exhaustion and defeat and slink to the mats. Every minute I avoid the free weights, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the power rack, he gets stronger.
Like Hercules with a discounted PureGym membership, they appeared as if they had spent lockdown in a home-made prison, furiously pushing and pulling household objects in the garage, and chewing on the cud of Tupperware broccoli chicken and rice. Their task is Sisyphean: an endless, gruelling up-hill to no-where. I would have made the comparison to their faces, but not doubt they would have remained silent, wondering what it meant, and how to spell it. The mind of the gym lad is, indeed, an inscrutable abyss.
With Neolithic verve, clearly relieved to be back in the bush, they lifted and dropped things whilst the staff, with the sadness of death, sanitised and wiped and sanitised and wiped again, emphasising the incessant cycle of their counterpart’s rep counting. It did make me reconsider my weekly jog - indeed, the woodland paths on which runners are wont to roam look like they haven’t been sanitised in weeks. With embarrassing contrast, I hauled myself through circuits with the air of a martyr trying to make themself comfortable on a sacrificial altar. It was an interesting dose of perspective, to say the very least. I regretted taking to quarantine baking with such elan.
Some still linger around the weights, seeming to not do anything at all, as if by some trick of osmosis they will suddenly gain an obscene amount of muscle. It is too easy and cliched to mock the gym goer, but let’s do it anyway. Old habits die hard. If life without abs renders existence hollow and uninteresting then you need to reconsider your life plan – and I don’t mean deciding to sub leg day for chest day.
Quarantine has made me realise two things: that gyms are overrated, and primarily, all I want is to live a blameless beautiful life with lithe arms and a means of satiating my appetite for cake without any adverse effects on my waistline. After having taken to lockdown jogging with aplomb, now not even the sight of an untended squat rack affords me what I call real happiness. Like the dregs of protein powder, the truth is gritty and often hard to swallow. Health is the greatest wealth, but I prefer the mantra: Eat Out to Help Out. It is the way of the world.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.