EmailThe closest gym to my home is in a dark archway under a railway bridge. It's a tiny, steamy den packed with medieval-looking contraptions. Peer through the cracked windows and you'll see that, despite the unappealing decor, it's packed with men all going purple as they try to lift the heaviest weight possible. Men - gay, straight, healthy or otherwise - trust weights: according to a Fitness Industry Association Mintel report in April, 38% of male gym-goers use weight-training machines, compared with 16% of women.
Chris Mundle, a personal trainer, remembers learning his trade in a hardcore weight-training environment: "You went to a gym and there was no carpet, no fancy machines, just rusting weights. Guys walked around in shorts and vests and weight-training belts. Gym culture was about the way you looked and talking about who you had slept with the night before. The showers were cold and there were only men. Even now, some of my old bodybuilder friends think of the new health-club gyms as fluffy and feminine."
Even though it might seem as if most men have embraced the "fluffy" decor of the health club, look at their actual workout regime and they may as well be in a weights-only gym, giving each other towel flicks. Men still make a beeline for the hard surfaces of muscle-building machines, where all the other men are. In the distance, women are stretching, running and cycling, watching the TV and listening to personal stereos; beyond that, other women, and maybe a brave, lone male, are jumping up and down, and having a laugh doing aerobic salsa.
So why do so many men studiously ignore the huge range of aerobics classes and cardiovascular machines available in today's health clubs? "Spending more time with [weight] machines affirms a sense of masculinity in men that they are doing a 'real' workout, and only using the treadmill for 'warm-up'," says Roberto Olivardia, co-author of The Adonis Complex and a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School.
Although both sexes may use the treadmill to the same degree - 28% of males and females, according to the Mintel report - the male approach to training is different. "Men are twice as likely to claim that they use, or would like to use, weight-training machines to build muscle and strength, whereas this is not appealing to women, who are more interested in toning up their bodies without adding weight," the report stated. Men seem to go to the gym to suffer, to fulfil a routine, to speed sweatily through pain barriers on the road to butchness. There's a prison-cell concentration to doing free weights and, while biologists claim the rush of endorphins is pleasure-giving, most of the grunting sounds penitential. Talking is taboo, and even the closest of friends become strangely focused by the time they're deep into their third "rep".
The only men who seem to be relaxed at the gym are those who spend half their lives there - the personal trainers, the addicts, the pros. We mock these bemuscled hulks in the pub, but they morph into heroes at the gym. And, secretly, I wonder: how do I get anywhere near that level of tautness?
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