I am – this will shock you – not a hugely active person. Once when getting some sort of health assessment, I asked, in all serious, if “standing” was an exercise. Apparently, it’s not. To this day I consider “sitting down” to be one of my actual hobbies. If there was a publication called Sitting Down Weekly, I’d definitely subscribe. Don’t even get me started on “lying down”. I feel it is man’s most natural and happy state. I’m lying down as I write this. Ideally, I’d never get up.
But young people are all down the gym, apparently. I see them everywhere – in the park and on TikTok – with their little, roundy baby-faced Charlie Brown heads atop monstrous Hulk Hogan bodies. I never really understood the appeal. There wasn’t really a gym culture when I was younger. There was “sport” but at a certain point the tribal nature of youth culture meant that insufferable hipsters like me left sport behind. In my youth there were nerdy swots and rugged sports folk and flaky artsy types. You’ve seen The Breakfast Club. The subcultures rarely crossed over.
This all seems insane nowadays but that’s what the 1990s were like. I went off into a world of books and bands and comics because winning races and punting orbs at nets felt a bit pointless to me. Also, at this point in history top boffins hadn’t discovered that exercise could actually be good for you. Nowadays even boffins go to the gym. I know several boffins who are quite buff. They are buff boffins or, if you like, “buffins” (my wife says I can’t be a “buffin” because I’m not a “scientist” but I disagree).
I only discovered that elevating your heart rate could be pleasurable for the first time because I was in a band and lionised energetic stage performers like Elvis, James Brown and Jon Spencer. Sporting a tight white suit I would gyrate for 40 minutes and then gasp wheezing into a recuperative pint at the side of the stage. “Jesus, I thought you were going to die up there,” said one well-meaning “fan”.
In my 30s, a friend and I started to go running frequently. It was before the current running cult to which we have all lost loved ones. We didn’t do it right. We didn’t stretch. We were usually hungover. One day when we started our morning run my friend was still smoking his pre-run cigarette (you don’t hear of that too much these days: pre-run cigarettes. Just one more example of a beautiful tradition destroyed by the woke mob).
We did several park runs and one mini-marathon but when people asked us what our “time” was we had no idea what they were talking about. We didn’t know people measured stuff like that. We also wore what I can only describe as rags and our running style was “probably being chased by police”. I know this because I would occasionally catch our reflection in shop windows or in the eyes of horrified pedestrians. I had to stop running after a decade or so of this because it began to hurt my back and my knees. I am confident that this has nothing to do with not stretching and is more likely because I was cursed by an evil wizard who thought I was getting too attractive.
These days I’m not entirely sedentary. I walk a lot. I get at least 10,000 steps a day. But recently I was talking to my GP and she suggested that I should also use my arms sometimes. Prior to this, if someone had asked me about my arms, I would have said they were in excellent condition. I mean, they’ve hardly been used.
Whenever there’s something to be lifted in our house, I ask my wife to do it for fear of damaging my precious hands (she thinks I’m a concert violinist). But apparently I should be using my arms. According to more top buffins, as a person gets older, developing upper-body strength is quite important. My doctor said things about “bone density” and “grip strength”. I didn’t take it all in. My approach to health-related information is more “vibes-based” and I trust my doctor and largely do what she tells me. She suggested that a man of my standing in the community (I think the words she actually used were “a man of your age”) might prefer a smaller, less intimidating gym like the one in the row of shops near my house (it’s good that it’s close by because, as we’ve established, I really hate moving).
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I went in there and had a consultation with a pleasant young trainer named Jamie after which we agreed that I was going to pay him money to order me around for an hour. I started going at least once, sometimes twice a week. I’ve been attending for a couple of months now. It’s nice and friendly there. I feel really good after the gym, mentally and physically. But don’t ask me what muscles I’m working on or how much I’m “pressing” because I have no idea. Jamie explains everything as we go but I turn my brain off as soon as I enter and I only turn it back on when I leave.
Friends have pressed me for information about what I do in the gym but, despite being a writer, words fail me. People who know stuff about gyms and exercise leave these conversations feeling very unsatisfied. I say things like “the leg thingy” and “trapezoid, is that a muscle?” and “the screaming exercise” and “what about rhomboid? Is a ‘rhomboid’ maybe a thing that I have in my body somewhere or is it a shape?”
At one point in each session I’m strapped into some sort of rack for reasons I don’t retain. It’s very possible I’ve been going to a dominatrix by mistake. And it’s possible I’m not going to the gym at all and that I’m just having an hour-long hallucination every Thursday at five. But whatever it is I’m paying for, it’s worth the money. I highly recommend going to the gym and I live in hope that I too may someday become a buffin.
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