eleventyone

I’ve been working out at my local gym every second day for the past four months and I’m feeling pretty fit, after four years of no real exercise. I’ve gained some muscle and lost a few kilos. I’m the lightest I’ve been in a very long time. I was actually quite a big fellow in high school. I was the fat kid and at most weighed in at around 120kg. I’m now at 74kg, which is near to losing half my body weight.

This may be becoming a fitness commercial, but how did I do it? Well, the first time I lost weight was one of those final-straw decisions. For three months I walked for one hour every day and lost 30kg. I joined my first gym five years ago to convert man-boobs to muscles and didn’t stay long. But now I have returned. My continued weight loss is a bit unfortunate since I’m trying to gain muscles and muscle weight is four times heavier than the weight of fat.

Gyms are interesting places. My first gym was out in country Gippsland run by the local council and my current gym is a commercial city gym. Without causing a deformation suit, I’ll talk about my current gym. Being a commercial gym they try to fit as many people as possible into the gym and have a constant membership drive. They keep pestering me to invite my friends, so they can have a free fortnight of gym access, or more likely pester them into becoming members. People avoid talking to each other, but I like hiding in the crowd when I’m exercising anyway.

Richard Branson

There are a range of noticeable characters in my gym. There’s one man who unfortunately wears a full-body lycra suit. There’s a man who talks on his mobile the entire time he’s at the gym, he speaks loudly on handsfree, looking like he’s talking to himself. There’s the guy who always walks way too close on the treadmill and squeaks his foot really loudly on the metal edge. There’s one guy who looks like Richard Branson, who’s an outgoing kind of guy so it could be him. There are also those people who grunt when pulling heavy weights and make the funniest faces ever.

At every gym there are big intimidating muscle-men, who have big muscles and want bigger muscles for some reason. They are not just bogans, but overtly masculine acting muscle-freaks with too much testosterone, called ‘heroes’. One local gym advertised ‘no mirrors, no heroes’, because they like to look at themselves in the mirror. I can see why women would go to women-only gyms with these guys around. My current gym places them all up the far end where I don’t have to interact with them. Of course there are plenty of hotties (muscley bodies can get pretty hot) and pretending not to perve is a choice skill (not wanting to be perved at is another reason to stay away from the gym).

I use what would be considered the beginners machines. They are nice and simple machines to work the main muscle areas. There are slightly more sophisticated machines after that, then we have the heroes hanging out amongst the dumbbells, benchpresses and advanced machines. The object of using these is to lift or pull weights that are challenging for you, not light ones which are easy and not really hard ones that you have to strain quite hard to move. Straining on these weights will end up hurting your muscles and they’ll be sore for a whole week after coming out of the gym, this is not what we want. If you’re able to do a dozen or whatever number of repetitions you do and still find it challenging without hurting yourself, then that is the right weight. I keep imagining someone straining so hard that they rip their arm right off, with blood coming out everywhere and plenty of screaming, and I imagine this when pulling really heavy weights, then I end up in gigglefits, causing me to lose my weights with a loud bang.

I use the treadmills and bikes, making up several kilometres worth of virtual travel each time, where earlier this year I would be panting while walking up a hill. I find it interesting when watching people run, where they all start to synchronise. I do the same thing and the running pace is like a metronome that help keep me going. The treadmills and bikes all have LCD televisions screens attached, which I don’t use because I’m not that interested in television, but I must admit I do sometimes put Millionaire on to answer the questions. Other people have to watch the television, just to be entertained while doing the laborious task of walking, running or cycling. To listen to it they must plug in their earphones to the screen. Amusingly, I’ve seen some people have their earphones yanked out from their ears, because of short cords and intense running. It does hurt.

The odd thing I find about these gym machines, is not that just when you get off the treadmill real fast and you feel like you’re still moving, no the odd thing is the wasted-energy factor. There’s heaps of wasted electricity from all those damn tv screens, but also if you put a physicist in there he’d freak out, because the energy we exert onto these machines are wasted. The energy we put into the bicycle is party converted to electricity to light the little display screen, but the vast majority is converted to heat. Ok so the treadmill needs electricity to run, unless it was on a really high angle, but the rowing machine, bicycles and stepping machines could easily capture a lot of energy. Weight machines could also do the same if someone actually through about it.

The potentially energy lost as heat at the gym is enormous, plus there’s the electricity from the air conditioning system trying to lower that heat. So not only is there wasted electricity from tv screens, there’s energy that could’ve been turned into electricity and countered this loss, but is instead being wasted as heat, which again wastes more electricity to remove the heat. And all this comes with a fortnightly fee. Although they do open the door sometimes to let in the winter air.

I suppose if you really want to be green you wouldn’t go to the gym in the first place, but instead walk and run outside, ride bicycles outside (there are some great bicycle tracks in Boroondara) and use weights such as dumbbells at home, which can be used to work every muscle just as a machine can. Or else find a natural methods of weight lifting, like carrying groceries all the way home from the shopping centre. One idea for a natural, green, organic-certified, cheap, weightlifting technique, taken from my years as a perpetual uni student, is borrowing textbooks from the university. Then carry them all day, until the weight of the textbook and weight of guilt of not doing any study outweighs the joy of procrastination. It might be useful to borrow physics book and learn how to construct green gyms.