There was a time when the gym was a pure place. A functional place. You went in, suffered, left. The weight machines were occupied by normal people doing normal things: lifting the weight, putting it down, moving on with their day.The stretching area was a low-ego sanctuary, where the post-menopausal women and men with questionable knees could collectively ignore one another while attempting to salvage some basic mobility.
That was ten years ago.
Now? Now the gym is a stage. It is a theatre of performative masculinity, a TikTok production set, a social experiment in misplaced confidence.
The Era of The Sub-Influencer
There is an insidious new species of gym-goer. You know the type. Not quite an influencer, not quite anonymous, just self-important enough to believe the world needs to see their Romanian deadlifts from three slightly different angles.
They do not train for anything, as such. They train for content. Their tripod is their training partner. You now have to navigate not just the people in the gym but also their carefully-curated camera angles, lest you accidentally wander into someone’s life-changing fitness transformation montage.
Their workouts too are a nonsense. Not a single compound movement in sight. Just an infinite sequence of variations, each with a brand-new wrist strap configuration.
And because they’re influencing, they’re not moving quickly.
Nobody Uses a Machine for Less Than 20 Minutes
There was a time when people would finish a set, wipe the bench, and fuck off. That time is gone. Now, a single incline bench is home to one man, his girlfriend, three resistance bands, a mini tripod, a protein shaker, and the ghosts of everyone else who once hoped to use it.
The three-set rule? Dead. What we have now is nine micro-sets, interspersed with two-minute reflection periods, a quick check of the pump in the mirror, and a series of deeply unsettling vocal self-affirmations.
Children. There Are Children Here.
3 PM.
Thursday.
This is not a time when schoolchildren should be anywhere but school.
And yet, they are here, occupying space, dressed like extras from a Love Island spin-off, attempting to bench weights they have no business even looking at. They should be in PE class, but it seems that PE class has relocated to Nuffield Health, Surbiton.
You watch two 19-year-old men in socks sparring in the functional training zone, boxing gloves on, common sense fully off. You make eye contact with a woman in her 50s trying to do some basic hip mobility exercises in the same area, and there is a mutual understanding. This place is no longer for us.
The Gym Is Now a Financial Illusion
One might assume that a gym with an entry fee north of £80 a month would filter out the worst excesses of the Gen Z energy drink economy. That it would be an enclave of working adults, former athletes, people with mortgage agreements, herbaceous borders and creaking joints.
It is not.
It turns out this Nuffield is part of the modern financial miracle, wherein a generation of people who claim they can’t afford rent somehow have active subscriptions to HelloFresh, Netflix, Gymshark, MyProtein, and a £17-per-day vape habit.
And Yet, I Still Go
I could leave. I could accept that this is no longer my world. That I have been phased out. That the gym, once a place of quiet suffering, is now an open-plan ego festival.
But I won’t.
Because I refuse to let a man in a Under Armour hoodie filming himself doing isometric curls be the reason I surrender my back mobility.
So I stretch, awkwardly, in the corner.
And I endure.
Because I was here first.
John Gibbard 