Folks, we’ve got a full-blown crisis going on in the exercise world.
No, I’m not talking about a stampede of newcomers banging down the doors on Jan. 1 because it’s a “new year, new me.” The cool part about living in a small town is you won’t get the hordes you see on the mainland, and I would NEVER make someone feel bad about getting in the gym and doing something healthy.
Unless, of course, you’re not actually DOING … well, ANYTHING.
I’ve said a million times that if not for my job, I’d be pretty dang happy going back to the days of the ol’ flip phone (shout out to the glory days of the original Motorola Razr and unlimited free Verizon-to-Verizon phone minutes after 8 p.m.). As it is, I’m trying hard to scale back what I’m pretty sure is an undiagnosed full-blown screen addiction. So believe me, I get the urge to scroll endlessly.
But the other day, I walked into the gym and had to stop myself from laughing out loud. The place wasn’t crowded – again, perks of our small town. There were fewer than a dozen people, all set up on separate machines.
Not one weight was actually moving – but every single person had a trusty smartphone in hand.
Now once again, I get it: Every exercise needs recovery time, and if you’re working out alone, sending the newest almost-funny Instagram reel to your best digital pen pal or the group chat is a great way to pass the time. But out of curiosity, I hung around and stretched, just to see how long it would take for someone to even look up from their phones.
It took almost five minutes for someone to start moving again.
At this point I was more amused than anything, and since it’s not a crowded gym, there were plenty of machines to go around. I was less enthused, however, two weeks later.
It was a new workout on a new day, and for this particular exercise there was only one weight in the gym that fit my needs. Unfortunately, it was in use at the moment. Well, that’s if you count being under the foot of a guy scrolling on his phone “in use.”
“No worries,” I thought at first. “Skip this one for now, move on to something else and we’ll come back later.”
Wrong answer.
Over the next half hour I would go on to finish four sets each of three other exercises. Apart from, you know, the actual effort of working out, the second biggest task of the day was keeping my jaw off the floor when I was done.
The guy hadn’t finished his exercise. He hadn’t finished a set. In half an hour, he hadn’t finished a single rep. He was … you guessed it … still sitting there in the exact same spot, scrolling on his phone.
Is this the exception rather than the norm these days? In the Keys, I’d say yes – but again, I’m so glad I don’t live near a crowded downtown gym contending not only with the scrollers, but the people who somehow think it’s a requirement to film EVERY rep of their exercises for social media (even funnier when they throw up a caption like #silentgrind).
Let’s be honest, though: The phone insanity in gyms could use a reality check, and maybe that should get bundled in with the “new year, new us” resolutions.
Because I will say this: If you “exercised” but left the gym with more Tinder swipes than squats, maybe just save that for a Netflix session on the couch.