When I was younger, gyms were nothing more than simple buildings. They had all the charm of a Soviet-era government building and smelled like old sweat. People did not seem to care about aesthetics.
They only went to lift heavier things and put them back down, a strange ritual that for some unusual reason led to larger muscles, smaller waists, and a greater amount of pride. No one needed to record any of this, and no one needed to be proved as present. The only proof of one’s exercise was the eventual change in one’s physique and the satisfying ache in their muscles the next day.
How foolish does this era sound to me now? Last January, I decided to step forward and join a gym. However, I did not want to join one of those old school weight lifting pens.
Now fully aware of my own mortality at this point, I managed to pull myself up and did not account for the charm of a prison. I, instead, decided to step into a shiny temple of exercise with blinding white bright lights and enough mirrors to make everyone in the room look like they’re on a magazine cover. The first indication that things had changed was witnessing that almost half of the people in the gym spent more time looking at their phones instead of the weights that they came to lift.
Initially, I thought that they were keeping track of their workouts and checking videos to perhaps guide them in lifting weights. I mean, both of those things seem logical, right? I was wrong.
So very wrong. They were taking selfies. Hundreds of selfies.
Selfies pre workout. Selfies mid workout. Selfies post workout.
Selfies inside the locker room. Selfies in front of the water fountain. Selfies while shaking the protein bottle like it was an Olympic torch.
The gym of today, I started to understand, is no longer primarily a space for working out. It is a content creation studio where working out is but one of the many activities one can do to promote themselves digitally. During my second week at the gym, I came across a young free weights user who had staked his corner near the mirror.
I watched as he set up what can only be described as a small film production. A smartphone on a tripod. A ring light clamped onto a nearby machine.
A bluetooth remote for the camera in his hand. What was he doing? I took note of the timer, and for a total of 45 minutes he completed 3 sets of bicep curls.
The rest of the time was utilized in going over footage, shifting lighting, altering angles, and choosing which version of his arm he would want to present to his followers. To put in such an immense amount of effort to show off such minimal work was, in itself, worthy of appreciation. If this person had devoted the same attention to actually lifting weights, he wouldn’t just look like a Greek god after the filters, but could also actually be one.
Based on what my friend Sarah told me, the women’s locker room is even more terrible. “It’s like some photo studio in there,” Sarah said while we were having coffee. “They have an unspoken schedule as to who gets to use the perfect mirror that is lit by the skylight.
Women start lining up around 5 when the sunlight is just right.” It seems like people have developed an entire sub-culture around locker room etiquette geared towards preventing interference during someone’s post-workout photo shoot. Just as Kabuki Theater features players using specifically defined ways of speaking and portraying different characters, gym selfies feature poses people have created over the years of taking workout selfies, like the “flexing while resting” or the famous “putting the camera away while getting ready for a workout.” There’s these things called the “mid-workout intensity face”, which completely obstructs any resemblance of how someone looks when exercising, and the ‘surprised to be photographed whilst working out’ pose. It’s truly remarkable what people can achieve by simply setting timers on their phones, angling the camera, and then pretending to be caught in the middle of a pose perfecting their best features.
There’s not a single rhyme or reason to how these poses are constructed, and they can be broken to anyone who attempts to caption their work on older self-built gym branding accounts. The captions portray a form of literary description ranging from extreme motivation to fabrication such as, “Just a quick workout before heading to work” while the image shows someone that looks completely masked and unwilling to reveal themselves without being embarrassed and requires nearly an hour of preparation and additional disguise. What is most perplexing is the seemingly held belief that anyone actually cares about these virtual fitness diaries.
People are getting used to posting diaries of their gym attendance onto popular social media in the same manner someone would have cared to see the incremental progress a stranger’s deltoid development. The bottom line is, no one wishes to be motivated with the notion of having to glance at a shake. And no, no one is looking to be “informed” that you “smashed leg day.”
Yet the influencer fantasy remains, fed by the exceedingly few individuals that actually make real business out of their “selfies.” For every thousand gym lovers for which working out is an obligatory activity only hosted to show their actual audience – who coincidentally happen to be uninterested high school kids – one does is actually successful.
Of course, the situation is a little worse than attempting to become a professional sports player but a better option in places requiring less effort. The people who suffer the most in this situation are the people like me who just want to use the equipment. While waiting for my turn for the bench press, I realized I had to sit in line for 15 minutes while someone resting on the bar pretended to be a supermodel – with the only real change in their sequence being a single rep out of the now imaginary 45 they claim to perform to complete a fashion photoshoot.
I remember once a time where I asked a young woman how many sets of reps she had on the leg press and her response was that she was “working”. I was rather perplexed and then I started to piece things together, where I realized that by “working”, she means filming content for her fitness account and not ever doing any exercise. The leg press machine was just a tool in her social media performance like how furniture is used on a television set.
These modern gym post artists do require certain pieces of specialized equipment for selfies, which is truly wondrous as the free market responds to peculiar needs. There are now phone holders that latch onto weight monitors, selfie sticks with which to capture perfect angles for representational glamour shots of muscles, and even programs that add a realistic sweat shine to a face that did not do enough work to produce actual sweat. These accessories fill gym bags that appear packed for a 3 week camping trip instead of a 45 minute workout.
I have seen people come in fully equipped in a way that makes my camping trips look mundane such as: leggings and shorts in different slots of their bag for different clips of their “content”, multiple pairs of shoes, hair products, makeup kits, and enough protein powders to open a pharmacy. Selfies taken at the gym is a phenomenon that gives me the hardest time. It is startling how easily some people seem to detach themselves from reality.
I have seen people exercising in ways that would make any trainer cringe, and yet, with the right angle and filter, they present themselves as fitness specialists. Moreover, I have seen some people enlarge their risks by attempting to bear weights that are far beyond their capability just so they can snap an appealing picture. Their fitness journeys do not seem to tell a complete story sometimes, which raises the question of how many bridges would actually be required.
This phenomenon does not end here. There are more extreme instances. For example, has anyone ever witnessed a gym where the attendees are encouraged to actively make as much noise as possible, rather like a ritual?
There are some who take it too far where the noise level one has to endure is unbearable. Unsurprisingly, they do not care about the people in their vicinity and simply want everyone to know that they accomplished their tenth rep. These things seem odd.
However, it seems like there is an extension to this oddity. Those who are accustomed to this environment tend to make more noise when they see an attractive person, or if they notice someone staring at them. Now, even the clothes worn in the gym seem to cater to the camera more than the workout session.
The days when exercise clothes were basic and served their purpose are long gone. Advanced technologies are now used to highlight certain body parts, compress them, or create simple fabrics that give the illusion of looking fit without actually having to do anything. It is as if some people attempted to design these clothes without first understanding their purpose; the garments would be useless in real life.
Women’s leggings are now embedded with features that enhance certain anatomical assets for photography, otherwise referred to as the scrunch butt. Men’s shirts also experience a severe cut that aims to make them look like they have broader shoulders and a narrow waist. While the upper body of a pear is typically closer to a triangle, this is not the case in real life.
The athleisure industry has invented these clothes to allow everyone to look 15% more fit than they actually are, all for the sake of a picture. The supplement industry has taken this approach far too seriously. Selfies taken with the gym shaker bottle are now a “thing”, apart from wearing the special label clearly gives away the purpose of the photo.
The content of the shaker bottle, which is a color found nowhere in nature, does not help. These supplements feature everything ranging from ‘Extreme Fat Incineration’ to ‘Explosive Muscle Growth’. These also come embedded with pictures that can only be taken for real using tools like Photoshop or months of hard work.
I want to make something clear: I don’t have a problem with people posting their fitness transformations. For some people, especially those facing severe physical difficulties or going through a real transformation, this can simply be motivational and serve a good purpose. There is value in capturing months of hard work in before-and-after photos.
What baffles me is the separation of before, during, and after photographs capturing different angles within different lighting. It is not documenting progress; it seems like a narrative is being sculpted around fitness that primarily lives in the digital world rather than one that is real. The saddest aspect of this gym selfie epidemic is when people do not reap the main benefits of exercising: mental clarity and stress relief because they are too busy attempting to benefit from it, in front of their followers.
People stop exercising their sweaty, contorted faces to look at their phone and see if people liked the gym post they made, and it’s disturbing. When I think back to last month’s Tuesday, I realize that I can recall what happened when the gym’s WiFi stopped working, which was quite something. And now imagine if the emergency alarm went off during a power outage: people were more panicked than anything.
This where the real crisis lies – if a workout is done without social media being involved, did it even occur? The manager comforted him saying that they did not intend to do anything malicious and they wanted to fix this instead. But the strange part is three of them went straight away.
These people seemed to think that exercising without the option of logging it was useless. ”But it’s leg day. Everyone needs to know it’s leg day,” one woman exclaimed under her breath while gazing hopelessly at her phone.
I suppose leg day isn’t a necessity, Jessica. I have over speculated it multiple times now and the byproduct of attributing everything to a person’s social media account is worrisome. It’s almost as though the individual become focused on documenting snippets of their lives, rather than actually living it.
The process of living is now being reduced to content and the essence of life is left behind. Well, maybe it’s just me showing my age. It’s also possible that this is the way fitness culture was always meant to evolve with technology.
Maybe two decades from now, gyms will be specifically built like studios with exercise props and training equipment decor, and the thought of exercising without filming it would feel the same way we feel towards handwriting letters or speaking to people on trains. For now, I keep doing my workouts where the lighting is terrible, and there are less mirrors in the gym. I work out in the voids left behind by content creators while filming themselves from different angles.
I lift in blissful solitude where my efforts are only seen by some clueless novices that are yet to figure out that in today’s reality, doing a workout that’s not recorded, is the same as not training at all. And honestly?, if you want to know how I look in the gym, I won’t shy from telling you: quite sweaty, mildly confused, and red-faced with my head in the clouds looking at the free equipment that everyone is fighting over. You can rest assured that this won’t be on my social media, because quite frankly some things are just best to keep hidden.
