Gym Bollocks

It was my birthday last Saturday and I was lucky enough to be treated with a night away at a posh hotel. It was just me and my wife for 24 hours. With no kids and a criminally large supply of chocolate and booze, we were set for a pleasant stay.

To try and offset the imminent overindulgence, I headed down to the gym. I shouldn’t say gym, because the hotel actually described it as a ‘Technogym’. Intrigued to find out what this meant, I headed in there. It turned out that a Technogym isn’t somewhere that plays Pump Up the Jam whilst you exercise, it just means that all the equipment is really complicated. I wanted to do my usual 10k on the rowing machine, but I had to tell it my life story first. Many questions were asked about my background and suitability to sit on the machine. I answered them all stoically, did my row and got out of there.

This is why I don’t really do gyms. Because they are generally bollocks. The modern day gym is crammed with so many distractions, I’m amazed that people have time to actually do any exercise. While I was on the rower, I watched a bloke wander in. In the twenty minutes he was there, he did the following:

Had a drink of water.
Did a couple of lunges with major breath exhalation.
Watched the news.
Nodded his head to a tune on MTV.
Ate a boiled sweet.
Watched me on the rowing machine, seemingly assessing my technique.
Tried to work out the bench press machine, then gave up.
Looked out of the window.
Adjusted his shorts to get his balls just how he liked them.

He finished off by doing that stretch where you put your arm over your head and end up looking like the dead bloke from Deliverance.

That was it. A sum total of bugger all. He’d have burnt more calories standing outside and smoking a rolly.

When I was leaving, I clocked a machine that offered me a ‘Body Composition Analysis’. I stood on it for a couple of minutes and it printed out a page of results that I’ll never have the mental capacity to understand. Apparently my Segmental Edema is 0.331 on the ECF/TBF and 0.377 on the ECW/TBW. No? Me neither. I also have a value of 31.2 in my Intracellular Water. I took great comfort from the provision of this utter load of bollocks.

I subscribe to an old fashioned school of thought that says that exercise and staying fit is really quite straightforward. When I was in the army, the gym was a place of work. You tried to stay out of there, because horrible amounts of exercise took place in them, under the supervision of Physical Training Instructors, who could only be distracted by mirrors.

The fun never stopped and the sessions were cheerfully referred to as beastings. If you were spotted trying to get a breather, you were sent to hang on the wall bars with the other skivers.

For most of us, it was much more preferable to go out for a run.

To do this, you put on a pair of trainers and root around to find your smelliest t-shirt and least smelliest socks. Then you go outside and run until you’ve had enough. At the end of the run you can conduct a low-tech Body Composition Analysis by asking yourself the following question.

Am I knackered?

If the answer to the question is yes, congratulations! You can go home, as you now have some ‘beer in the bank’. This same BCA can be applied to all forms of exercise. That’s how complex it needs to be.
The true guru of exercise was Victor Comic character Alf Tupper, or ‘Tough of the Track’.

Without needing to wear enough gadgetry to land a space shuttle, Alf would beat all the monocle-wearing cads of the Amateur Athletics Association after working as a welder for twelve hours then eating fish and chips.

I imagine that if anyone had enquired as to his ‘Visceral Fat Area’ he’d have just welded them to his bench!