Gymsanity

In an attempt to make amends for last week’s goof-off of a post, I’ve done some actual thinking about what motivates people to come into the gym.

For sure, there’s a certain subset that buys the membership or hires the trainer simply for the status. Beyond the poseurs, however, there are three kinds of people who in fact show up routinely: The Purist, who has a genuine desire to improve his health; The Egomaniac, motivated by his desire to be buff, generally in the hope of gaining access to female reproductive services; and The Addict, who uses his workout to convert emotional pain into more manageable physical pain.

The Egomaniac is the most amusing, of course. He got in his car and drove to the gym in order to improve his physical appearance. Yet, I see this kind of guy all the time just leaning against the equipment and staring at women as the women lift actual weights.

First of all, this kind of behavior is an egregious violation of the three second rule: When you identify a woman of interest, you must approach her within three seconds. Otherwise, you’ll not only lose your nerve, you’ll also creep her out. More importantly, I’ve always thought these guys would have a much better shot in the long run if they worked out themselves – you know, bulking up in reality.

I’ve written in the past about why people don’t want go to the gym. Now, I thought it might be interesting to focus on why people do. Unfortunately, I’m running short on time. So I tracked down an announcement that made headlines across the country, the results of a recent study about people’s motivation to have sex. Though you’d assume people have sex for simple and straightforward reasons, the research revealed dozens of varied and complex motivations - 237 in all.

I’ve inserted a chart below. The left side shows the top 10 most intriguing reasons people gave for having sex, and the right side shows the top 10 reasons I think people are motivated to go to the gym.

Rest is an important part of every athlete’s training routine. I find that after just a few days away from the gym, I return to workouts that possess more energy, more enthusiasm, and that joints and sinews bend pain free.

The same principle also holds true for creative intensity. I’ve decided to take a break this week from blogging about craziness at the gym, and write instead about the blog itself.

After a little over six months, I’m about to pass 10,000 hits on gymsanity.com. This number doesn’t count the people who also read my blog without actually visiting the site, either through a feed reader or direct email subscription. While the (free) WordPress platform I use offers no information about the geographic distribution of my readership, my subscribers’ email addresses span 12 time zones.

I can also tell you that the hits coming into my site represent more than just me refreshing the same page over and over: WordPress knows enough to ignore my visits to my own blog. On the other hand, I am also aware that not every visitor recorded by the site came looking for gym humor. WordPress shows me daily the search engine terms people used to find my blog. Such terms have included “guys getting off in the steam room” - an indecent reordering of the words of this perfectly respectable post.

Most people assume I was motivated to start this blog for some financial purpose - or that it was an excuse to post a half-naked picture of myself online. In reality, this blog gives me the opportunity to be published without anyone’s permission; to touch and influence others without securing approval from an editor or boss. Most importantly, I found a forum where I can get my music out and let it play.

For many, that’s also what the sport of bodybuilding is all about. Now I know plenty of people who find bodybuilders’ superhero proportions to be unnatural, even ugly. But these naysayers are missing the real achievement on display: a group of athletes that have found their passion and are fulfilling their destiny. Bodybuilders endure a remarkable degree of pain for their sport, whether it’s hoisting some agonizing load in the gym, or resisting the urge to indulge outside it. Still, the fact remains: it’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else.