A desire to change my lifestyle post-lockdown led me to sign up – but it’s the mental benefits that have kept me going back
Gyms are temples for the terminally vain to worship their own bodies and set fire to their cash. If you want to self-improve, read a book: and why, given the limited time slot granted to each of us to be alive, waste so much time in self-indulgent solitude? More sinister than that, gyms prey on insecurities fostered by a popular culture that worships unrealistic physical types: and as a gay man, I belong to a community in which body dysmorphia struts around the dancefloor with gleeful abandon.
That used to be what I thought, anyway, and even when I surrendered to gym membership, I felt like a tone-deaf singer signing up for a choir. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, flexing with free weights in all sorts of unlikely poses while I sheepishly faffed around with the treadmill and aimlessly tried the occasional weight machine hoping that grunting a lot was some sort of sign of progress. (It’s reassuring to know this did not make me exceptional: research suggests more than half of us don’t know what to do in the gym.)
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
