I regret to report that I have discovered a new low in gym music. Something more annoying than regicide rock and more debilitating than Barry Manilow: Nonstop talk from a group of giddy DJs. And when I say nonstop, I mean no music at all. An Oscar night review. A recap of yesterday’s The View. An interview with a local mixed drink specialist.
I couldn’t wait for the commercials.
I consider myself something of a gym connoisseur. If you count all the college gyms, Gold’s Gyms, government-owned gyms and hotel gyms I have worked out in at least once, I must have sampled at least 100 centers of fitness. And regardless of the quality of the facility, they all seem to struggle in at…
Let’s take a look around my gym early on a Saturday morning. You have to figure that the folks showing up before 9 a.m. on the weekend take the activity seriously enough. We’ve got one guy wearing dark sunglasses, in this windowless gym prone to power failures. Another guy, dressed in a Barney-the-dinosaur purple running…
Although I’ve clearly taken sides in the ongoing conflict of gym vs. member, the strategies on both sides deserve recognition. Gyms have the home field advantage, of course, forcing members to devise engineering marvels just to get in a decent workout. At one gym, I came across an ingenious solution to the inexcusable lack of…
Since no one has risen in defense of the sport of swimming, I guess I’ll just do it myself: Dear Muscleman, Though you claim to have spent years as a competitive swimmer, you seem to have missed the most rewarding aspect of the sport – the competition against yourself. As you know, the most important…
In a prior post about gyms and membership fees, I wondered: Is the cost worth it for “the super high end place that … lets you grunt away in a spa-like environment?” Well, I don’t want to talk about the circumstances, but I found myself in just such a location today. You know the kind…
I imagine the neat thing about being rich – and I’m talking really rich – is that you can indulge your interests in the extreme. John Travolta pursued his love of flight by earning a commercial pilot’s license, then building a house attached to an airplane hangar connected to a private runway. Steve Wynn’s personal…
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I think I would have to murder the employees behind the desk if my gym did that. I don’t bring my mp3 player to the gym unless I’m doing one of my cardio only workouts.
The worst sound effects in the gym: the idiot (predominantly) college students that get angry and kick the weights and curse and yell before lifting. This ridiculous display is frequently coupled with one repetition poor form gym goers.
My gym, a Gold’s no less that can certainly afford to get a better playlist, regularly has A-HA, The Maryjane Girls, early Christina, Brittany, and N’Sync, various European pop bands nobody has heard of, and that crap from Jessica Simpson. If listening to this BS isn’t bad enough, TVs are emblazened with the videos. Thank you Steve Jobs for inventing my Ipod and keeping me from blowing out my brains in the middle of a bench press.