Don’t use germs as your get-out-of-gym card
Q Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic I am terrified of germs in the gym. If I do go, which areas or equipment should I avoid?
A The gym gets a bad rap. I’d posit that your office is as bad, if not worse. Yes, there will be fewer sweat patches left on pleather boardroom chairs and possibly less out-of-breath banter, but what lurks outside human perception is terrifying.
In March 2020, I registered discomfort about attending a stodgy public-private marketing briefing session in a government office in downtown Joburg. I was berated, and a companywide email spoke of the hypocrisy of those who love to go to the gym but refuse to visit offices on the pretence of being exposed to the coronavirus.
The person to whom I reported was sedentary, so I took it as a tirade against fitness. The public-private briefing was cancelled anyway, and within days we were sent into the glorious peace and quiet of level 5 lockdown. The office and the gym were out of bounds.
Since the pandemic, there hasn’t been an infectious cold or flu in my house. In fact, I don’t remember being sick since before the pandemic.
Yes, I don’t train at a commercial gym any more. However, I train at a private facility that is fully booked from 6am to 6pm. I still go to restaurants, malls and public events. Recently, I attended a techno bash in Pretoria with thousands of other has-beens. So what, then, has changed? I work remotely.
I remember the coughing, the sneezing, sharing the microwave, the grimy elevator buttons, the metal handles on the bathroom doors. Remember the archaic fingerprint biometric system? I used to hate it when sick people spluttered through the office as all I could think of was how long I would end up missing gym.
I am is not calling offices cesspits of bacteria and viruses. I am pointing out hypocrisy. When you remove a can of beans at Woolies to read the label before returning it to the shelf, do you know how many people did that before you? Were they sick? Did they wash their hands after using the bathroom?
We live in a world of germs. I remember reading about a study published in the Metro while riding the tube in London. The report described E. coli, blood, and all sorts of other horrors present on tube escalator handrails, pub door handles, and on the hands of randomly tested people (who greet with handshakes). A 2016 study found “Staphylococcus aureus [the bacteria responsible for toxic shock syndrome], E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Serratia” on British public transport.
STUDY
Canadian consumer watchdog Marketplace conducted a study on gyms in Toronto. They studied various parts of the gym, including cardio equipment, barbells, dumbbells, exercise mats, yoga balls and the showers.
European Cleaning Journal writes about their findings: “Researchers discovered that exercise mats harboured almost eight times the amount of bacteria as yoga balls and more than dumbbells and barbells.
The mats tested were also found to have particularly high levels of staphylococcus. But the gym showers were of most concern since they harboured more than four times the amount of bacteria as the mat as well as elevated levels of yeast, mould and staph.”
The report says that other parts of the gym were less concerning and that there would need to be a weakening of the immune system, or open cuts, to get an infection.
Recently, there was wholly unscientific hype on YouTube about a person in Canada who claimed to contract chlamydia in his eye from using his towel to wipe a gym bench. Unlikely alibi, but you can imagine the hysteria.
Health.com says that busier gyms are more likely to spread germs through the air and that 10%-30% of surfaces are likely to have an array of bacteria present.
WebMD writes that “more than 10-million bacteria are on a typical office desk — 400 times more bacteria than found on the average toilet seat”.
Face it, germaphobe, we live in an infected world. All you can do is practise personal hygiene and be conscious about what you do, where you do it and how you do it. Or become a hermit.