Working out the difference
Fresh off getting musical in their last tête-à-tête, Carly Gooch and Michael Wright hit the gym and get physical. Well, one of them does ...
Engage your core ... It’s beach season ... Eat. Sleep. Gym. Repeat ... and so on: Michael Wright
Ilike the gym. It’s been nearly a decade since I went to one, but I like it. Honestly. For years I avoided them. Running was easier and, as you can probably tell from the photos, I wasn’t exactly built to shift tin. But like one of those relentless Les Mills slogans probably says – gyms are for everybody. So one day I declared second place the first loser, failure a non-option and pain merely something without which there would be no ‘gain’, and joined one.
And it was good. There’s a strange satisfaction in making your way around a weights room and doing …whatever it is you do. An autonomy. Running is just one foot in front of the other. At the gym, you can do this or that or the other thing. Which sounds simplistic but variety matters. I couldn’t believe I’d only been doing one form of exercise my whole life.
There were ancillary benefits, too. At the gym, you get to talk about things like ‘reps’ and ‘gains’ with the only people who don’t think talking about reps and gains makes you sound like a complete tool. You learn the difference between being ‘in shape’ and ‘not unfit’. And when you’ve spent your entire life looking like Glenn McGrath on a hunger strike, you only need your wife to say ‘you’re looking bigger’ once for it to completely go to your head.
But just like that, I stopped going. Children take many things from you: Sleep, disposable income, long-term goals. But the biggest thing is time. And this is where the defence case for the gym falters. A run takes three-quarters of an hour. That’s it. From getting off the couch to walking back through the door. The gym is double that, with the added burden of being somewhere other than your house. I’m fairly sure if you keep asking the question, ‘Hey babe, finished work, heading to the gym, be home about half 7 what’s for dinner?’, the answer, eventually, is divorce.
So I’m counting the days until buying a gym membership won’t be equivalent to setting fire to $15 a week. Or in the case of IHF Health Club, who were kind enough to host the photo shoot for this column, many, many multiples of that. Which might seem steep but once you get in there oh my God. They have plants growing on the walls and free coffee and something called Prama classes. There is polished concrete everywhere. And is your gym even a gym if it doesn’t have a sauna and a plunge pool in the changing rooms?
One day I’ll go back. Not there, obviously, but I’d be willing to take up arms dealing or something if it meant I could afford it. I miss the reps. And the gains. By the way, if they’ve used that photo of me doing squats honestly I can do way more than 60. That was just so we could get the pic ...
No dumb belle here: Carly Gooch
‘Ihaven’t been to the gym for months,” a friend tells me – and yet, she’s paying for her membership every fortnight. It’s pretty common – gyms making money off lazy people. In defence of all the sluggish members though, breaking up with a trainer isn’t as easy as just clicking ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom of an email; at least, it wasn’t a decade ago when I last unfriended a gym.
Call me frugal, thrifty, careful with money or plain stingy, I’d just rather spend that membership money on anything else without feeling intimidated by all those fit bods in a gym.
I get it though, as soon as we start paying for the privilege of a gym, it’s as if reaching our goal is imminent. Just the act of joining a gym shakes 1kg, then booking that spin class sheds another 500g. Conscientiously getting up at the crack of dawn to go to some kind of weights class with a fancy name that sounds like you’re going to a rave prompts another kilo to drop off, and maybe one centimetre larger biceps.
Alas, as much as I wish that were true, it’s not.
At the end of your first week, nothing fits better, heavy things are still, well, heavy and there’s still the mid afternoon bag of lollies on your desk.
Suddenly, the gym loses its shine and you find every excuse not to go – and before you know it, a year of weekly membership fees are down the drain.
I’ve been that person to some extent, until I discovered boot camps (groups training in parks) and a tolerance for running.
I remember telling a mate I’d started running and she replied, “Why, are you being chased?”
No. But while I hate every minute of running, I make it bearable with music, and I feel so damn good when I get home sweaty and red-faced – there’s a real sense of achievement that pounding to nowhere on a treadmill just doesn’t give. It’s those same outdoor runs that make me feel justified in tucking in to the hot cross bun or marshmallow egg this Easter.
As Mike mentions, there’s extra time to be considered when going to the gym, even if it is “just down the road” from home. Before long, a 45 minute workout adds up to two hours. Meanwhile, I get up and put my active wear on (using it for its general purpose of being active – not brunching or doing the shopping). It’s a short walk to the tv where I flick on a 30-minute workout of my choice and all it takes is 30 minutes before walking into my kitchen for a banana smoothie.
If the pain of climbing stairs the next day is anything to go by, it’s not an exercise in futility – and I didn’t even need to think about gains or reps.