Gym rage: 10 things you can do to contribute to it
Making people angry makes them workout harder.
Listening to an audio recording will be easier than reading this while you’re burning off rage at the gym:
“How many more sets do you have?” he asked, far too loudly, because he was wearing giant Apple AirPods Max headphones that he probably purchased with .1% of his bottom-quartile hedge fund bonus. I looked up at him from the mindless sanctuary of my phone. He was wearing an Aspen-themed Aviator Nation trucker hat, a faded Dartmouth lacrosse t-shirt, and a very impatient expression on his entirely average face. I’d planned to do just one more set before moving on to another machine.
“Four more,” I said, matching his volume and holding up my middle three fingers to make sure the inconvenience I was creating for him landed both audibly and visually. He blinked and exhaled and looked to his right, then back at me. And then he walked away, looking at his phone. I bet he said motherfucker under his banana brotein-powder breath.
This is because literally everything that anyone does in the gym adds to the aggression that people already feel while working out in a very costly, confined space that blasts lowest-common-denominator hiphop music, and this is a good thing, because aggression makes people work out that much harder. Working out is particularly important right now, because mid-March is the conclusion of the two-month stretch after the holidays that people spend actually working, and everyone has shifted their focus to planning their summer in Europe and making their bodies look less ghoulish for when it is never not Spritz O’Clock in a sarong.
You could leave it to chance that simply setting foot in the gym will contribute to the rage that motivates people to pedal, run, row, lift, or plank harder, or you could be more deliberate in your behavior and ensure that you do your part to redline your fitness community’s temperament. While there are countless ways that you can transform a normal person who is working out into a seething middle-aged male in a Chrysler 200 on the Massachusetts turnpike in heavy traffic, the following 10 have been scientifically proven to suddenly spike adrenaline and cortisol to levels that are correlated with widely publicized felonies.
10. Sit motionless on a popular machine, slack-jawed, staring at your phone for more than 3 seconds. When someone asks you how many more sets you have or if they can work in, immediately commence doing a set, and then go back to looking at your phone when they walk away.
9. Cover everything that you or your belongings touch with not just a little workout towel but several giant bath towels that you’ve brought from the locker room, creating conspicuous laundry waste and giving everyone 2020 flashbacks.
8. Bring literally everything you own to the gym and explode it onto the tiny locker room bench to ensure that no one has space to sit down (and stare at their phone), which will compel someone passive aggressive (like me, for example) to move one of your belongings just a bit too dramatically at the very moment you are paying attention. Bonus points if your bag is a blue or green duffel with a bank or private equity firm logo on it. I’m so sorry that I’m going to spill my bright pink amino acid drink on it.
7. Wear your faded Chase Corporate Challenge (before it became the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge) 5K finisher t-shirt, your Harvard or Dartmouth t-shirt, or literally any kind of college lacrosse team t-shirt. Even the 84-year-old women who just float in the pool wiggling their fingers listening to Beyoncé in the aqua-fitness class will want to trip you on the stairs while you read Bloomberg News on your phone, because even they know that you’re grabby and belligerent when you’re drunk.
6. Flaunt your dexterity, strength, and self-importance by creating an elaborate multi-station workout on the gym floor with box jumps and kettlebells and jump ropes and barbells and basically anything that you can move from where it belongs and take up 38% of the open floor, ideally in a high traffic area. You could also stack every single available plate onto a machine to work out a body part that you have inflated to a clownish size to compensate for being a guy who is 5’4.
5. Be about a 6.5 on the not-to-hot scale, and misinterpret someone’s absent-minded glance at you as physical attraction (they were probably judging your Alo Yoga top). Then, make one of those mildly annoyed, dismissive faces that only mildly attractive women and gay men make when they think someone is cruising them.
4. Talk loudly on your phone in the densely packed free weight area, ideally in a foreign language. Bonus points if the language is Italian and you’re wearing sunglasses and making big hand gestures.
3. Bring a water bottle large enough to get you across a desert and, while looking at your phone, fill it up to the tippity top at the water fountain (which has the volume and velocity of air conditioner condensation) right across from the studio where a very sweaty HIIT class has just concluded.
2. Don’t sniff-test yourself or your gym clothes before entering a crowded place to sweat where people are breathing deeply in close proximity to you.
And the most effective way to give a totally average human in the gym the fury of an entire pack of starved rabid hyenas…
1. Walk up but especially down the staircase in the gym very slowly during peak hours while looking at your phone, and become so engrossed in your ex’s latest IG story that you actually pause for a moment right in the middle of the staircase. This is the number one way to create rage in the gym, and someone will probably strangle you with one of those weighted fitness bands if a wet elderly lady doesn’t trip you first.
Have a great workout.