Frozen Nipples
Growing up, like most young lads, I was obsessed with playing sport and chasing girls in no particular order but I never saw an obvious link; certainly the concept of a gym held no appeal to me whatsoever as a means of keeping fit or anything to do with girls. It seemed to me that gyms were all clunking metal, tattooed meat-heads and so cold and dingy I would have been better off in my dad’s garage with his Bullworker; where I did spend the odd night risking my nipples being surgically removed every time the thing snapped back into place, resisting my puny efforts to stretch this glorified elastic band across my chest to achieve the “look”.
However, with the end of my twenties looming it became clear to me that I could be seeing more of the phsyio’s table than the great outdoors as certain bits inevitably began to creak; and so it was that I entered the hitherto unknown world of the gym. When I went to sign up at the local muscle emporium all I remember was a gorgeous leggy blonde on reception with magnetic eyes guaranteed to get you to sign your life away; she should have been selling pensions. One look into the gym and it seemed to be a sea of lycra-clad women; had I found heaven?
The New Discos
The gym I joined – and remain to this day at least until they read this – was predominantly a squash club at the time with a bar and night club upstairs known locally as The Last Chance Hotel. Allegedly, even after a gallon of Tetley’s at the local, a bag of pork scratchings and smelling of curry and chips, if you did not score at the gym bar on a Friday night there was definitely something wrong with you. My early years confidence did not need such an acid test though and so I rarely ventured there as you were never likely to be let down by the safer option of fish and chips and the long march home solo.
In the early days there was nothing like the range of classes or indeed, mind-boggling machinery we have these days all aimed at inducing a heart attack inside an hour. Initially it was all a bit intimidating with these weird machines offering untold agonies competing with MTV blasting out and threatening a perforated ear drum or two. The treadmills remain to this day a real challenge positioned in front of the giant screen; the advent of pop videos bordering on soft porn hardly helped the running stride and I bet Seb Coe would not have won that gold medal training in these conditions. It seemed only a matter of time before I fell off the thing tripping up over my tongue, jaw wide open; maybe I would be better off running with a helmet and a gum-shield.
Pump Time
Gyms to me though are as much a social as a physical exercise and the lure of the class session has always had more appeal than grunting in front of a mirror with something akin to my dad’s vest on trying to look like the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I sought out a few classes which had the added advantage of being packed out with girls; hell could this place get any better? One of the first I tried was an early version of Body Pump, which should definitely come with a warning specifically aimed at the over-confident male of the species along the lines “You Will Not Be Able to Move Tomorrow – Guaranteed”.
The big mistake, in a class largely populated by women, is looking at the modest weights stacked up at each station and assuming that you must choose at least twice that because these are, after all, only girls; this is guaranteed to ensure that you will promptly collapse in a heap inside ten minutes with muscles on fire and screaming in protest. For days after my first class, my entire upper body and arms were on fire and I cried myself to sleep. It is always pleasurable these days as a seasoned pumper, pardon the expression, to witness the latest muscle-bound newbie stack up the weights only for the look of shock to slowly spread across his face mid-way through the first exercise as the realisation that being water boarded would have been more fun and certainly not cost £5 an hour.
The Comfort of Routine
Eventually I discovered a class called Circuits which ran Mondays and Thursdays with a great guy called Mal who ran the class for around twelve years with a devoted following of near disciples; it was probably the beginnings of a cult. Circuits, as it implies, is a set of varying exercises moving from station to station in pairs and so I chose my little, balding mate Winky in an effort to make me look good. It was brutally tough but the compensation of several attractive girls again softened the pain and offered a diversionary view or two whilst the body screamed in protest. This was not a pick up class though; any hopes of playing it cool and maybe landing a date were always nullified after an hour by looking like a sponge, snot dripping from your nose and Winky trying hard as he could to make us making us look the only gays in the class.
Mal’s class ran so smoothly that change was not very well accepted; it was the only class where the male ratio approached fifty percent and, as is well known, we do not do change that well. Granted he would vary the exercise stations from time to time but the warm up was sacrosanct and after a few years practice even the rivals for Worst Movers of All Time – me and Winky – could jig about well enough to get through the warm up without too much embarrassment, safe on the back row with all the other lads hiding whilst simultaneously taking in the view. What messed us all up though was when Mal went on holiday; invariably we got as his replacement one of the instructors from another class to throw us all out of our comfort zones.
Barbie
You saw the warning signs early as Bradford Barbie waltzed in resplendent in spray-on body suit, complete with head set, beaming bleached teeth and boobs so pumped up it was a wonder she was not attached to a basket and in need of being tethered to the ground. A quick blast of More Music to Get Your Sledgehammer to Volume 45 and off she went. “Come on guys – wooooooo! Is this great – woooooooo!! And one – two – three – four woooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!” Soon it was a question of who wanted to stuff the microphone down Silicon Valley for a bit of peace and quiet.
Bodies often went everywhere but the right direction; there were so many different moves that we must have looked like a bunch of maggots in a fishermen’s tin and it would have been fair to note “there ain’t no black there”. When Mal came back he was treated like a returning hero and once again we slipped back into our favoured routines.
These days there are a bewildering array of machines and more classes than the local adult college. My favourite, in a masochistic kind of way, is Spin which involves pedalling on a static bike invariably to more music that would prompt you to smash a radio into smithereens; this is generally at the same time as your eyeballs begin to pop and you sweat like a prisoner of war. It is forty-five minutes of sheer hell.
Fitter or Fatter?
Despite the popularity of gyms though – these are now big business – added to our expensive stadia, high profile events and deluded notion that we are a sporting nation we are now the fattest in Europe. People go to gyms now as much for vanity as keeping fit and healthy and most spend as much time in the spray tan booth as on the running machine; true you are unlikely to trip up in there and break your jaw.
Perhaps as infuriating as it gets are the young girls who seem to come to the gym simply for somewhere different to chat; you can spot them a mile off sat at some machine, barely moving, magazine spread out and an array of mobile devices that would shame Barack Obama. The make up is impeccable and in no danger of being disturbed by sweat as none is likely to be generated; these types are a dream to the gym owner who welcomes them with open arms safe in the knowledge they will not be wearing out the machinery and retain that gym direct debit for their entire lives as a badge of honour, probably oblivious to ever having signed one in the first place.
Young lads are just as bad seeming to view the gym as a place to preen and pose; it seems to me that young lads go to the gym to look good for girls whereas old lags go to train and look at girls; life can be cruel for the elder statesmen. As eccentric as I may get though I daresay I will never revert to standing naked in front of a mirror with a hair-dryer caressing my bollocks. It’s just not the same at the gym any more!
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