My Beef With: The Gym Trial

My legs are heavy, knees weak, arms are sweaty, there is not vomit on my sweater. Yet. It’s the day of my gym trial. It gets to a point when you feel like you know your way around a treadmill. Know how to put one front in front of another on the stairmaster. But every time you join a new gym you think this could be the one. The one where the treadmill instructions are written in Japanese, or the one where you have to do some sort of ritual before grabbing on to a pair of dumbbells.

The gym trial is an experience that everyone has to endure in their lifetime. For some it comes earlier in life, others it is fresh into adulthood. The gym trial can make you feel like you are relearning to move your body all over again, but not in a spiritual, I-have-newfound-control-over-my-body way, but more in a ‘usually-when-I-put-one-leg-in-front-of-the-other-I-walk-and-not-jig’ way. The elected leader of this experience comes in the form of an overexcitable yet forgiving gym trainer, who you can tell has mastered telling people how to just simply walk in a way that doesn’t sound like ‘just walk STUPID!’. They are like the people in those quiz shows that can make up complex sentences about 18th century art from words like ‘dog’ and ‘mat’, and their patience is a great comfort when cycling for your life on an assault bike or clinging on for dear life on the stairmaster.

The Treadmill.

Stepping on to the treadmill, you forget that you ever walked on a flat surface in your life. Ground? What is such a thing? This strange surface that I have been blessed with feet to walk upon?  Once on the treadmill, the air between your feet and the ground starts to feel like marbles and you get an impulsive thought to even break out into an Irish jig. The gym trainer who has the unfortunate task of being the one to show you around starts interpreting your uneasiness as an invitation to teach you how to walk. Like a baby relearning it’s first steps, there’s no point trying to justify to him that you can in fact walk, you just have to moonwalk it out and convince him otherwise. Grinning like a toddler face to face with a monkey in a zoo, without telling you they start to increase the incline without consulting you first. Surely this warrants as some sort insider plot to embarrass you in front of all the gym bros waiting for your literal downfall. You look into whether anyone across history has ever sued gym trainers for putting incline up to 3.5 on the way out.

The assault bike

Next up it’s the assault bike. The bike is easy. It’s just a bike! I do this everyday on a green version that also happens to be electric…oh well. Cycling to work has never been so easy. Wrong. The assault bike can often feel as if you are cycling away from all the demons that threaten to deter your calm mood, as it literally is called the assault bike after all. It feels as if you are about to take off from somewhere but you can’t get the momentum just right that you remain permanently trapped in a gym that comes with no windows and a lingering sweaty odour that you are debating is emanating from yourself or your gym trainer. Cycling in the great outside is so rewarding but in the gym it’s a soul-less affair due to the fact you are often doing it with a masochistic gym trainer who insists on doing this thing called ‘interval training’ that can feel like you are cycling up Pen Y Fan at one moment, then hurtling way too quickly around a bend at Silverstone the next. The assault bike is made worse by the fact that it releases such an extreme amount of air, you worry that people will start getting the wrong idea and you are actually just using it to mask severe flatulence problems. The term ‘assault bike’ paints pictures of gym trainers thowing those boulder-like loaded M&S cookies at you or even your mum’s sourdough loaf that is so heavy it could count as assault, yet you soon discover that the reality is actually a lot worse than this imagined scenario.

Weight station

Entering the weight station for the first time can often feel like you are walking the plains of the sahara desert, and a pack of hungry hyenas are watching your every move.  Back in the jungle (or on the stairmaster), you were the queen. You could watch over these hyenas and mock their grunting and groaning in weight corner, feeling powerful as you took to your first time on the stairmaster like an elephant rollerskating. The weight station takes me back to physics lessons when we would learn about how north facing poles would be instantly drawn to south-facing poles. The north-facing magnets in this situation at the gym are the men who when sensing even an ounce of ‘I have never done this before energy’, will instantly insist on showing you how it is done. You could be the weight-lifting champion of 2023 and 2024 but these individuals will still give their unsolicited advice on how to execute the correct form. Leaving the weight station, you don’t feel intimidated, more pissed off that becoming a gym member for the first time warrants a mansplaining take down like no other (excluding the gym instructor who you are at least paying to mansplain). Doing some of the weights for the first time you

The Leg Press

Sitting at the leg press for the first time evokes the same feeling within myself that I can imagine Anne Boleyn had whilst waiting to get the chop. ‘Are my legs positioned right…. do i put my head this way or maybe I should just leave it where it is’?. Bar the fact that she was getting her head removed, the leg press is pretty similar. At first you feel like you have cracked the code and think that you have just naturally been blessed with strong lower calf muscles, but that’s when the gym instructor takes it upon themselves to watch you sweat and heave embarrassingly as they put the weight up. That’s when you realise it was never easy in the first place, and Anne Boleyn probably thought the same when the axeman appeared with a sword and not an axe to chop her head off, yet soon realised that this was a swordsman and the outcome was still going to be the same and he was not in fact going to challenge her to duel for her life up in the Tower of London.

The Sauna

The sauna is a  gym trainer free zone, and it gives you a chance to compare your torture experience with fellow gym-trial survivors. ‘OHHH yes, I had one once who insisted on using the gym bands as a whip and would hit the ground with it like a toreador every time I managed to execute a plank properly. He would also pretend to chase me on the treadmill and I would feel like that dinosaur which appears when you have no internet on your computer, jumping over barriers trying to outrun them’.  Hearing other people’s experiences you start to feel that you maybe got off lightly, yet on the way out you start to sense that you can no longer walk without wanting to break out into a jig and you fear your gym trial experience has not been completely banished from your body just yet….