Tag Archives: gym

Throwback Thursday! The 5 People You’ll Meet at The Gym

It’s that time of year again! Time for many of us to join a gym for three weeks. This is a classic post from 2013 that is always appropriate this time of year. Just like that Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaventhere are also five kinds of people you’ll meet at the gym, and I promise you they are not heavenly.

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Was your New Years Resolution to get in better shape? Did you sign up for a gym? You may not know it by looking at me, but I belong to a gym. I think there was a law passed stating that the more popular a gym is, the louder the music has to be. If you were to notice only the music and people on cell phones you’d think you were out at a club. I’ll be damned if I can find someone to give my a beer though. That’s why I fill my water bottle with beer before I go.

There are several categories of people that go to a gym. I think that the smallest number belong to the group of normal people who go to the gym a few times a week just to stay in decent shape. That’s the group I’m in. There are several other types. Which one do you fit in to?

1.  “Three-weekers.” You may be one of these and don’t know it yet. I call them this because they probably won’t use their membership for more than three weeks. One way to spot the three weekers is that you’ll see them sort of drifting around the gym watching people use equipment as if they are watching animals at the zoo. They do this to try to figure out which pieces of equipment they might be capable of using without becoming a danger to themselves or others.

2.  Locker Room Nudists. Who doesn’t hate these people? These are the people who are obviously way too comfortable with their bodies, and in general they’re usually the people who shouldn’t be. For God’s sake, put on a towel when you walk from the shower back to your locker! And do not, under any circumstances, talk to ME while you are naked. We’re not that intimate!

3. “Women” at the gym. Some of them scare me. When women start doing things like wearing weight belts and bench pressing, doing pull-ups, and curls, I get a little scared about getting too close. I want no part of a pre-menstrual woman who has more muscle mass than me. That is not a safe combination.

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4. “The Bicep Bunch.” Just imagine the theme song, “The Bicep Bunch, the Bicep Bunch, that’s the way we became the Bicep Bunch!” There would be the t.v. screen full of the little picture squares, except instead of looking at each other and smiling they would all be looking at their flexing biceps and smiling. In that scenario I would be Alice. The Bicep Bunch has a uniform too. It consists of work boots, denim jeans and a black muscle shirt. They literally walk around the gym in groups of several guys in this identical outfit. I call them the Bicep Bunch because they’re only interested in working out their upper body in hopes of impressing women. Not that impressing women is a bad goal. For most of these guys though, their bodies are disproportionate. They spend so much time on their upper body and none on their lower body that they just have little stick-like legs. I imagine in a fight they’d be pretty easy to take out if you just “sweep the leg Daniel” they’d fall on their back and like a turtle be stuck that way with their little legs flailing helplessly in the air until the rest of the Bicep Bunch flipped them over.

5. Cell Phone People. I have no freakin’ idea how they can even hear anyone on their ear buds over the din of the music. The only exercise these people are getting is exercising their mouths. I’m sure they can’t do real exercise because they’re so winded from talking. It’s always a temptation to drop a big weight on these dopes. Not that I’m carrying big weights, but maybe I could persuade one of the Bicep Bunch to do it for me because after taking out their leader Karate Kid style I am now their king.

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I Was Cross with CrossFit

I’ve always gone to a gym or done some kind of exercise to keep in shape for nighttime crime-fighting on the rooftops of the city.  I went to the gym the other day and encountered my worst nightmare. Last month, bored with my usual gym routine, I decided to try a CrossFit class. First I had to find the CrossFit class. It wasn’t in a gym. It was in the back of an old, dingy warehouse that looks like the kind of place terrorists plan things. It was filled with black and gray fitness equipment. There was loud heavy metal music and lots of grunting and sweating going on. (insert sex life joke here) The atmosphere said, “This is serious working out. You’re either going to die or be able to lift a Buick when you’re done.” The class was great, intense workouts which I loved.

Picture credit: www.lolpix.com

Picture credit: http://www.lolpix.com

I got the first month of Cross Fit for only $35 through Groupon. When the first month was done I told the owner I’d sign up for two more months. He said, “That’s great Phil. Please hand over all the money in your 401K.” Thinking that this was too pricey I decided to shop for other options to vary my workout routine.

For the last five years I’ve gone to a basic, no frills gym because it’s near my house. This week I looked at other gyms and settled on a new gym. The gym where all the pretty people go. I walked in and there was a chorus of angels and a bright light shone down on me from above. It was the neon sign above the juice bar. I felt like I had walked into a shopping mall. Bright colors, shiny new equipment. Shiny new people. Shiny, happy people.

The gym had all the other stuff I usually do, plus some classes that at least by the title on the schedule looked like they might approximate CrossFit. That’s where it got interesting and the nightmare scenario played out.

The first class I tried was called Bootcamp something. It was suitably challenging and by challenging I mean that I thought I might die by the end, which is a good thing. The challenging, not the actual dying. Avoidance of dying is why I work out. I’m trying to make my heart strong enough that it will never stop beating. Yeah, I know that’s ridiculous, but have you got any better ideas?

Also, apparently the key to being fit is incredibly loud music. At CrossFit there was heavy metal music. Here, at the pretty people gym, there was dance music blaring. I think after dark it turns into a night club. So the Bootcamp class was good. Then next I tried a “Body Works plus Abs” class. That’s when the nightmare started.

It was some kind of aerobics class. The psychotic instructor, Buffy,  wore a wireless mic and every two minutes, between shouting peppy instructions at us, she would give a “Whoop! Whoop!” At first I thought she had Tourette’s, but then each time she did it one or two people in the class would whoop back to her.

Picture credit: dailymail.co.uk

Picture credit: dailymail.co.uk

The nightmare was my attempt to get in rhythm with 15 other people who seemed to be doing the moves in time to the music. I’m not good with rhythm. It’s not my thing. Each time Buffy would start a new move I’d watch her, concentrating, trying to pick up steps of the move and the beat of the song and then jump into motion. I was terrible at it. Terrible to the point that the class held me down on the floor and put a stick in my mouth so I didn’t bite off my tongue during what they thought was a seizure. It wasn’t. I was just that bad. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to a psych ward for being a danger to myself or others. I was the equivalent of someone who doesn’t know how to swim being thrown into the ocean. I just flailed about and waited for the end.

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Body By Phil

According to the results of a study published by Dr. Tracy L. Tyka of Ohio State University, “Men are affected by those pressures in the media … or the pressures that others put on them to look more muscular,” she said.

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For years women have decried the unrealistic images of feminine beauty portrayed in the media. “That’s unrealistic,” we heard. “No real woman looks like that.”  “She’s airbrushed.” “Those are fake.” Well guess what ladies, it’s our turn.

That’s right. You just need to back off and let us get fat. We may all be working on 6-pack abs, but it’s a 6-pack of Budweiser. Let’s call a truce between men and women. How about if the men stop idealizing Hollywood anorexics and supermodels and you stop drooling over Bradley Cooper and Matthew McConaughey? We’ll let you have your curves if you let us have ours. In fact, it’s my opinion that men have it harder than women when it comes to pressure to have perfect bodies. Yes, you heard me right. On the dating scene you may think you need to be all tall and busty to attract men, but that is far from the truth. We’re guys. All you have to do is to be female and we’re happy with that. Do we have standards that we judge women’s bodies by? Of course we do. If you have a body we’re basically happy. Women on the other hand demand their men be 6 feet tall and built like a Greek god.

I think Dr. Tracy L. Tyka of Ohio State University said it best when she said, “Instead of pressuring men to be more muscular, (we need to) accept men’s bodies for what they are and instead focus on internal characteristics.”

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Hey, I don’t create the news, I just report it. If a scientist says it, then it must be true. That’s right ladies, we’re not just sex objects, we have feelings too ya’ know! Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about me.  I’m a total smokin’ hottie.  I was at the Man Meeting the other night and some of the other guys were getting down about this stuff, so I told them I’d mention it to you.

As always, if you enjoy what you read here at #ThePhilFactor please hit the Facebook or Twitter share buttons because that’s a form of exercise too.  If you enjoy my humor in the short form here you may enjoy more of it in the form of my two books that are in the sidebar there. Have a great weekend!