Are You Ready to Get Sweaty?

A Health Club Survival Guide

In this era of Obamacare and rising healthcare costs, many employers are offering employees discounted health club memberships as a proactive means to reduce claims for preventable illnesses.  As a result, record numbers of folks are flocking to gyms after a long time away, or perhaps for the first time ever. 

If you are one of the multitude who have resisted taking that first step due to fear of the unknown, what follows is a primer to aid you in acclimating to the modern fitness world and thus assimilate yourself into the social milieu of health club regulars.



photo courtesy lifed.com

A health club is like no other place on Earth or in space.  It’s an intergalactic amalgamation of body types, nationalities, ages, insecurities, and neuroses rarely assembled in one location at the same time, all boldly displayed on a noisy, sweaty stage for all to see and enjoy.  Here are some of the different archetypal characters you can expect to encounter on your first visit.

Meatheads: Every club has a few – both male and female – with muscle mass in inverse proportion to brains.  They tend to be fixtures at their favored club, not unlike a squat rack, weight bench, or building support column.  Often you will hear them before you see them owing to their obnoxious vocalizations, which are not necessarily a consequence of their efforts or their desperate need for attention, but because grunting is the sole means by which they communicate.  The reason meatheads are so massively endowed is they spend all day, every day working out.  This is not a result of their commitment to fitness, but in most cases because they’re too dumb to find the exit, arriving by special bus in the morning and placed out at the curb by staff when the club closes at night.  Although they appear large and fearsome, don’t be intimidated as they are slow witted and easy to fool.  (Think of the fully grown mountain troll from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.)  If you find their presence uncomfortable, just say loudly enough for one to hear, “Somebody left some performance enhancing drugs on a bench in the locker room,” and they will scurry after each other like rogue Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, not to return before you complete your workout due to the long odds against them finding their way back from the locker room. 
 

Athletes: These are the hopelessly young and fit persons who have no business working out, but because of their one dimensional, sports-focused, health-consumed lives, have no other interests or hobbies and therefore no place else to go.  You don’t have to worry about them.  They will not approach you because they hate you, repulsed as they are by your imperfect body and lack of willpower.  Usually found in groups of two or more owing to their inability to socialize with non-athletes, athletes would just as soon kill themselves as live to 35 if it meant an end to running marathons, competing in triathalons, and consuming flavorless, high protein, scientifically engineered food substitutes. Nor should you let them make you feel inferior.  While they are more fit and conditioned than you could ever hope to become, at 50 you will still be able to move about on your own accord, whereas they will be confined to walkers and/or wheelchairs as a result of their artificial knees and hips and surgically fused vertebrae.

Non-Athletes: These are your scrawny, clueless, pointy-headed males mostly of third world origin who have never seen fitness equipment let alone used it.  This is not their fault.  In their countries, exercise is the unfortunate byproduct of manual labors like hand digging tunnels, assembling massive stone temples using crude, prehistoric tools, and walking in circles chained to a large, spoked wheel.  You will see them wandering around aimlessly, dressed in loafers, black socks, and jeans, poking and tugging at various apparati as they attempt to ascribe some purpose to each.  After several hours of exploration and emboldened by their incorrect interpretation of a particular device’s function, they will fire off several jerky, awkward reps, often facing the wrong direction with their feet in the handholds.  WARNING!  Stay away from these people for they are extremely dangerous.  It is likely that at some point during a workout, one of them will become entangled in a cable and get flung across the room, wiping out everyone in their path before becoming impaled on one of their countrymen’s bullet-shaped heads.

The Morbidly Obese: These people are only at the club as a condition of further employment by their companies or by court order.  Because they resent having to be there and are without hope of losing enough weight to avoid burial in a piano crate, they are typically in a foul mood.  You most often find them watching the Food Network while trudging mournfully on a T.V. equipped treadmill at the slowest possible speed.  After ten or fifteen minutes of Cupcake Wars, they will waddle exhausted and famished to a quiet corner of the club and fall asleep in an expanding pool of their own perspiration and/or vomit.  A word of advice: do not befriend these folks unless you enjoy testifying at coroner’s inquests.

photo courtesy newsroom.uni.edu

Prom Queens: It’s rare to encounter one of these expensively coiffed, silicone enhanced beauties in the club’s main venue as they typically prefer to attend group classes comprised primarily of women older and less attractive than themselves.  The prom queen’s purpose is not so much to sweat, which could prove disastrous to her makeup and hair, but to show off her sculpted body and $500 Dolce & Gabbana thong leotard in an effort to motivate and inspire the rest of the class by providing an ideal to which the others might aspire.  Make no mistake: the prom queen did not acquire her Victoria’s Secret body by working out, but instead at the hands of her skilled personal surgeon.  Pity her, ladies, for while most of you will return home to your husbands, children, and/or pets, all she has to look forward to at home is her bald, round-bellied, cigar-puffing sugar daddy awaiting his daily sponge bath.

Creepy Old Dudes: A warning for men: while in the club’s locker room, look straight ahead, and make eye contact with no one, especially kindly old men who attempt to draw you into conversation.  I’m speaking particularly about guys typically of European descent who are on the downhill side of seventy and confine their fitness activities to the locker room where they enjoy hanging out with other men their age discussing horse racing, their medical conditions, and Florida.  When I say “hanging,” I mean literally in that these congresses typically occur in the nude with the participants clustered around the ring leader’s locker, some sitting, others standing with one foot up on the bench, their dangling junk scraping the shoulders of their cohorts while they argue the merits of Marco Island versus St. Pete’s.

So there you have it.  You are now fully equipped to embark upon your personal adventure into fitness.  Best of luck, Godspeed, and if you stop to chat with me in the locker room, please be wearing pants.