Today over brunch, Jeremy mentioned that he thinks I should open my own gym in the future. At first I was really hesitant, but the more we talked, the more it sounded amazing. Here are some of the things we want for my future gym:

• No scales. That’s a big one. (We decided on maybe having a body fat measurer available for people doing personal training so you could measure relative body composition.)
• Community-focused, with gym events and an open door policy.
• Support groups.
• A recipe booket printed twice a year or so, with recipes gym members submitted.
• A wide variety of group classes.
• Lots of open spaces, so it’s not cramped.
• Posters on how to modify different workouts for beginners.
• A few more enclosed areas for people who are nervous about working out.
• Machines that would allow people with injuries, disabilities, or limitations to still work out.
• Health-focused employees rather than weight-focused ones.

What would you want from your ideal gym?

seventhsons:

I got 425 on the bar, about to shuffle under for my fifth and last set. My skin is flushed. I’m still gasping. I can feel the burst blood vessels in my eyeballs, giving me that “I’m prepared to eat your fucking child” glare that drives all the girls wild. My quadriceps have ballooned to roughly the size of Christmas hams, and they are filled not with blood, but pain.

Next to the power rack is a Smith machine, where some girl is telling her boyfriend “No, that’s too much! Take the weight off!”

She is squatting too, sort of, as far as one can call Smith machine squats “squatting”. But she has two tens on either side. 60 pounds total.

I take a break from asphyxiating and fix her in my addled gaze.

“How tall are you?” I asked. She looks uncertainly at her boyfriend (a legitimate meathead and obviously as put off by her histrionics as I am) then says, “Uhh, like 5’7”?”

I nod. Back in the North, I taught a gorgeous little specter of comparable size how to lift, and she was coming up on 200 for sets when we parted ways. 

“You could do 135,” I said.

“135 what?”

I looked at her blankly and she reeled.

“OH POUNDS?!”

“Yes. Pounds. Easily.”

“She doesn’t want to get that big,” her boyfriend told me. 

“They never do,” I told him. “Like it’s that easy. Like if you accidentally squat too much, you’re big.”

“Last week, you did 50,” the boyfriend said. “This was 60.”

“You lied to me!” she said, pointing an overmanicured finger in his face.

“It’s all mental!” he said. I laughed.

“You can do as much as you think you can,” I said. “You’re lucky you got somebody to trick you. You’ll never worry about a plateau.”

I got under the bar and banged out my last set. My head swam, my knees cracked, the edges of my vision clouded with those little green flies you get from oxygen deprivation. I reracked it and panted against the bar, and next to me, she was still trilling. 

“No, that’s too much,” she said from the bottom of her squat, under 70 pounds. “That’s way too much.”

“Rule of thumb,” I said, “If you have the air left to say ‘It’s too much’? You’re not squatting enough.”

The boyfriend laughed and nodded. “He’s right. Coach told me the same thing at that competition.”

“Good luck,” I said, and hobbled upstairs for further torture.