Episode 42: Gym Culture and Self Consciousness

Transcript

You know, gym culture, fitness culture, gym culture.
I'm going to talk most about the physical location of a gym.
Gym culture has gotten really, really strange, I think, over time.
It's not controversial, not that it has to be, but it's not controversial to say that the fitness, quote unquote, industry has really changed over time.
As so many other industries have.
But that's not necessarily what I'm talking about.
It's more about the actual going to a gym.
Through at least the last, gosh, it's been six years almost of my working out and fitness and whatever.
However, I've had the advantage of having I built out a gym in our basement here, a fairly well provisioned one for a home as far as home gyms go.
You know, I've got a cable machine and a rack and a bunch of dumbbells and some leg machines.
And it absorbs the entire basement except for a laundry machine.
And that's been a real advantage, particularly, I mean, some of that, you know, was really helpful through COVID times so that I wasn't, I didn't have to go to gyms.
But also from a timing standpoint, it's much simpler and much easier to be consistent when working out.
If you can simply hop down into your basement, knock out an hour workout between two Zoom calls or something, you know.
You can usually find a pocket of an hour much easier than you can find two, three hours to get to a gym, get changed, get ready, get the workout in, do whatever else, maybe hit the sauna, then get changed, then come home.
I've also started, I also got a gym membership fairly recently in the last, you know, five or six months, mostly to get some new variety of equipment.
I found that I've just been using the same group of equipment for so long that I needed some other things and some machines, some purpose built machines that you really don't, you know, it's not, it's not space efficient to buy all of these machines for all these different things in your own home, unless you have very large space and a whole bunch of money to play with.
But I find that the difference between me going out, and I do like going to the gym, it is nice because they have some extra facilities and I like to use the sauna and sometimes the pool and whatever else.
But the difference in time between doing that and just knocking out a workout at home is like threefold.
It's about a three-hour process for me to get to the gym, work out, do a couple other things while I'm there, and then get changed, drive home.
Compared to I can just duck into my basement, work out my typical lifting portion of things, only about an hour.
I can knock that out pretty quick and then move on with my day.
So it's a trade-off, but it's been kind of nice to have both.
Now, I'll say the gym was always kind of a strange place.
I have a particular frame of reference here, mostly because I ended up joining the same gym that I used to go to when I was in my, I mean, God, like 20 years ago.
It hasn't changed very much.
Some of the clientele is a little different, but it hasn't changed a ton in terms of the gym itself.
So it always kind of took all kinds.
In some ways, and this is going to sound a lot more disparaging than I mean it to be, but in some ways going to the gym is almost like looking at the website, the people of Walmart.
Like, it really just takes all kinds.
You get this, this just in crazy mixture of, of people, you know, and, and the gym that I go to in particular has always served this kind of middle ground.
Some gyms that you go to are very much, and I know this mostly from speaking with other people, but some gyms you go to are very much what some would refer to as a pump house, where it's like you go there and they're like, there's like, you know, steroid needles on the floor.
And like, people are just like screaming and yelling and, you know, just going nuts.
Right.
And then you go to some other gyms that are on like the total other end where it's just, you know, yoga studios and spin classes.
And then there's stuff in the middle, um, this one in many ways to me strikes as being almost dead middle because you get both.
You get, you get this kind of, there's this repertoire of classes that, that people go through.
There's also every now and then you get this, like somebody in the corner, just like screaming their brains out, trying to push out some insane ego lift off in the corner.
You know, you go certain times a day and it's, it's in some ways like walking into a nursing home.
There's, there's a very elderly crowd that comes at certain points in the day.
You go to other points of the day and you get this much like younger teenager kind of thing.
It just, depending on the time you go and the people that you happen to bump into, boy, is it a wide variety of things.
All of that is, is somewhat normal.
Like I'm, that's, I think how gyms are in my experience, at least in general, at least the gyms that I have gone to.
What's really different has become, I mean, several things, I suppose.
Some of it is phones, because when I really stopped going to public gyms regularly, that was only really the beginning of the smartphone era.
So when I stopped going to commercial gyms, this habit hadn't really formed yet of just people on their phones all the time.
And so you didn't, for instance, I was, I was there the other day and I never seen anything like it.
Someone came in, sat down on a fairly popular machine.
It was like a leg extension machine of which this gym only has one.
Got on his phone and just sat there.
Just like played on his phone for like, I did, I believe I did two entire exercises of like three sets of whatever.
While this guy was still just sitting on this machine.
I don't think he did a single rep.
And that type of thing just didn't happen 20 years ago.
Because it just wasn't, it wasn't a thing.
You didn't have these phones that were in front of everybody.
And the phone culture, of course, also if you pay attention to things online.
I haven't seen this so much at this gym that I've been going to.
But I know that it's also often a problem of people filming themselves while working out and other people walking into the shots.
And, you know, it becomes this whole like sub game.
It's like people aren't necessarily there to do the workout that they're supposedly there to do anymore.
It's much more about the showiness of it and capturing whatever it is you're trying to capture for social media.
And then you have, again, at this gym at least in particular, you have that kind of mixed in with this, with all these other groups of people.
Like these bonkers ego lifters and much more elderly people that are there probably for therapeutic reasons.
You also end up in this situation where like the trainers don't look like they've ever actually used a gym before, which I always find kind of odd.
Like they kind of, the word on the street was always they took about a weekend seminar, learned how to do a few basic things.
And they call themselves a trainer and try to build a clientele, which is a bonkers thing in my mind as well.
It just really takes all kinds.
Now, with all that said, if you're there to do the workout, I think you end up in a pretty good space.
Again, it makes sense.
You have access to equipment that you wouldn't otherwise.
And that alone can be a good way to kind of stimulate some things and just break you out of your mindset of, and I know that not everyone has, you know, the luxury of a fairly well-provisioned home gym.
But if you are working out at a home gym regularly, getting out of that space to go somewhere else can almost instantly provide some new forms of fitness stimulation to get through.
One of the other things I think is a little bit interesting here, oftentimes, people dislike getting to a gym because of the perceived self-consciousness around it.
I'm not saying that's the case for everybody, but it's definitely a thing that gets pointed at, where people don't want to lift in front of other people, or they think they're not going to be strong enough, or they're going to do it wrong, or whatever.
However, I do remember back to when I was younger, lifting, feeling some of that, not tons of it, not to the same extent as some, like I still went to the gym regularly at that time in my life.
But, you know, you get on that, you know, whatever, bench press, and you're only benching a plate or whatever, and then someone gets on there who's been lifting forever or whatever, and they load on three, four plates, and you're just, you feel like, man, like, what am I doing here?
There is the old adage of, you know, look, no one's looking at you, like, it doesn't matter.
Unless you're doing something really screwball or dangerous, nobody cares.
But the other thing that I've noticed, which is just sort of a totally side note kind of thing, because I spent four, five, six years lifting at home, and going through, recently, and going through these motions,
even though I used to lift weights, and used to go to gyms, and the last five or six years, I've been kind of extra serious about it.
And doing that day in and day out, in an environment where you don't have to ego lift, and you don't have to do all that to feel like your time is more consequential, or you're performing better in front of others, or whatever the reason is,
was a very valuable experience, because it put me into a practiced mindset, where I go to the gym, and I'm so used to lifting at home, that I forget I'm not lifting at home.
And I don't worry about the weights that I'm putting on the bar in comparison to anybody around.
I don't even realize that other people are there half the time, because I've become so practiced at doing it off on my own.
And I think there's something there.
When there are things that you feel self-conscious about, I mean, it's very close to just a desensitization type of therapy, right?
You just do it over and over and over and over and over again, until eventually you get to a place where your habit, your practiced habit, overrides anything else you have going on, where it just works.
It's like driving, I guess.
Because, you know, when you first start driving a car, all of your attention is on not making mistakes in the car.
Well, hopefully.
Let's assume you're trying to be a good driver.
But over time, the muscle memory of driving can just sort of takes over, and you don't think about it so much anymore.
Now, that can lead to good and bad things, and this is where the metaphor of driving kind of breaks down.
But in the case of this gym thing, intentionally working out at home in a way where I was focused on self-improvement, good form, pushing weight, getting, you know, good mind-muscle connection, good squeeze, good, you know, all that kind of stuff.
All the things you should be paying attention to while lifting.
And doing that for five or six years with absolutely no one else around me.
So, all I had to do was focus on what I was doing.
Now, when I am in front of other people, it's like the practiced habit of doing it well completely overrides any self-consciousness that maybe I would have felt, you know, again, 15, 20 years ago when I was doing this regularly in public gyms.
And I think that same mindset likely transitions out to other things.
So, think about that a little bit.
Next time you have something self-conscious that you're concerned about or worried about or other people around or whatever.
Is there a way to just practice it for some elongated period of time on your own where your habit and your practice will simply take over any other limiting psychological factors when you go to do it around other people or go to do the real thing or whatever.