What is it with blokes in the gym?

I‘ve been using a gym somewhere or another since the early 70s.

The first one was the Clark Hatch Fitness Centre in Tokyo. It was on the ground floor of a block of flats I stayed at so that made it rather convenient. After that came Hatch & Turk in Hong Kong when I lived there in the mid 70s. Membership there gave me reciprocal rights at other gyms in the Clark Hatch chain across Asia which fitted in nicely with the travel I did for my job.

In the mid 80s after we relocated to Switzerland and I worked in Zurich I signed up with Kieser Training. It had a gym close to my office so I used it lunch-times. Maybe unusually Kieser was 100% weights and machines, no aerobics they reckoned you could organise that yourself. When my office moved to Richterswil down the lake I switched to Schmucki in Wadenswil. That was where I worked out during the period leading up to my hip op and was a key factor in maintaining my muscle condition which aided my post-op recovery.

We moved back to the UK in 1993. We were first in Wilmslow where I used BJs Health & Beauty which is no more. Rather surprisingly it’s the only one of my former gyms up until that time which has closed down. According to their web-sites all the others are still up and running.

When we moved down to Cambridge later in the 90s I used a gym at the Cambridge Squash Club. It was OK but rather primitive and a little too far to be convenient. Fortunately the management moved the gym to a location in Girton where it was named the Barn Health & Leisure Club until it was taken over some years ago and renamed Prime Time Fitness. I took issue with the name change when they did it, because the Barn had character and I felt that the new name was just a generic health club name, but I’ve stayed with the gym and continue to use it regularly both for my own routine and for spin classes.

But back to the title. So what is with blokes in the gym? Certainly the ratio of males to females has changed significantly with more males these days. More and more of these seem to come just for the free weights and there’s more tats than previously.

But none of that’s a problem. What’s a puzzle is that there seems to be a certain breed of young men who have a tendency to occupy machines when they’re doing sets. They just sit there. I guess they’re ‘recovering’. That’s a frustration for people like me who simply want to go through my exercises, one set each, as quickly as possible.

It’s been like that for some time but nowadays it’s worse. They’ve got smartphones so every time they finish an exercise they consult their phones. And this applies whether they’re on machines or using free weights. What on earth are they up to? Generally speaking at any one time I seem to see about 50% of the male occupants of the gym staring at their phones.

We all know that there are triggers for all of us which prompt us to check our phones: stuck in traffic, waiting for a bus, grabbing a quick coffee. But between weights in the gym? Is it really that important to engage that much? Tell me please.