Anastasia Mironova How the customers of sports clubs have changed and why fitness shortens the lives of others 05.23.2024, 08:01

The gym has become crowded lately. There is a crush in the pool, and naturally, when the water rises, we are thrown around like jellyfish. These are all people experiencing Monday syndrome. These people start a new life on Monday and prepare for summer in May. It is very interesting to watch them. They start training in detail, going every day, training hard for two hours, randomly running from one exercise machine to another. They disappear after a few weeks by overexerting themselves. They also drink protein and become visibly rounder during their stunning sessions.

I generally love watching people at the gym; it’s not just a certain cross-section of society – after all, there you can study a cross-section of the habits, complexes and problems of this society.

For example, ten years ago, there were many people in the fitness club who were called fitness instructors. People for whom work on the body became the meaning of life, for years they lived according to a training program, with sharp and developed figures, ate protein according to the program.

Now they have slowly disappeared. In my club there are no such people even among the coaches, only one of them seems to be a fitness enthusiast from the past. The rest seem somehow ignorant, a little better than me. Piles of muscle mass are out of fashion. They probably realized that creating such a body takes all the energy and is harmful to health: joints die, kidneys cannot process so much protein. The heart also sits pumping blood to the large muscle mass. And most importantly, I have never met any woman who likes big men with huge biceps, plump hips and jutting butts. It’s something that comes from gay culture.

We should call a spade a spade: the protein hunk is a character from gay porn, women aren’t really into that sort of thing. Looks like the pitching guys got it. He disappeared.

By the way, among the female sex, phytonias also disappeared. They remained mostly among those over thirty years of age.

Here they are still ready to kill themselves in simulators. Often this preparation comes with plump lips and swollen breasts. I live in a residential area, here we have panel houses, DIY stores and a vegetable warehouse. The area is so-so. But this type of visitor is clearly visible in the gym: just over forty, a tattooed whistle, developed breasts and years of training behind them. Who are they catching with their whistles in our Kupchino region?

By the way, young people do not shape their lips. And they do not move into the hall. They have completely different standards of beauty.

Only donkeys are valued among young people. No, I’m serious: Twenty-year-old girls at the gym are just pumping their asses. Everyone is obsessed with hips with hearts. The girl may be skinny and have flabby arms, but she keeps pumping her ass furiously. Disproportionate figures with swollen backs are popular among young people. These girls spend all their time squatting and lunging in Smith’s car. To make the results look even better, they wear special push-up pants. Sportswear manufacturers began to produce a sea of ​​\u200b\u200bpants that turned the most ordinary butt provocative. Often girls also put foam padding on their bottoms before going to the gym.

Another fact from viewers: young women look better than young men. The difference is radical. Young men, with rare exceptions, look at me in such a way that, for example, I absolutely do not understand why I have to work my ass off for them. Lots of mattresses, shapeless fat men with elephant legs. There were no such things in our youth. Back in the 2000s, when I was 20, side fat seemed like the pinnacle of failure for someone my age. Today, young people look in such a way that in general there is nothing to look at. Very few are athletic or at least fit. The situation of those who still show the will and sign up for the gym is deplorable.

In general, our guys started to look bad. Women pay better attention to their weight – competition. Although there are more women than men among the younger generations, modern life affects men more.

Frustration with restrictions, high demands and the prospect of endless mortgages pushes men to an easier way out: burying themselves in the phone, locking themselves in the house, drinking beer. There are very few brave people among young people. They have a different time, there is nowhere to return, to prove themselves, there is no point in straining if, in the most successful scenario, a 30-year mortgage for a two-room loan in New Moscow awaits you. So they fly away.

Today’s women are more vital, they need something else because they have fierce competition for their peers who have not succumbed to social apathy.

These generations of active women and pale men gave birth to a new family type: the pot-bellied peasant and the “self-conscious” oppressed housewife. There are more birth workers working in gyms. The genre cannot be briefly described. In general, these are women who often stay at home with their children, often live poorly and are completely dependent on their husbands, who, as a rule, are always irritable, busy and stingy.

They are both 30-35 years old. Climbing the wall while sitting at home, the man works hard on a simple job. They have a mortgage, a car loan, and money is tight. For him, going to the gym twice a week is the only way to get out into the world. She literally dresses up for walking these five hundred meters from her home: She has a nice tracksuit and a big bag for the street. This woman definitely has lips, eyelashes and long nails. Children are in clubs or kindergarten. Her husband is usually pot-bellied, bald and picky. If he stops by occasionally to pick up his wife, he slowly drives her home while sitting in his loaner KIA. He is a king and a god, that’s why his lips tingle, his eyelashes grow, his butt jiggles, they are very afraid of upsetting him and always call him “rabbit”, because even for such a person there is competition, the rest are worse.

We seem to be freeing ourselves. The wage gap between men and women is narrowing. But how many aunts are still attached to their shapeless bald “bunnies”? Fear!

Unlike neglected young people, the number of athletic older men is increasing. The type is well known – a Soviet athlete. But I went through what is called an upgrade in a network fitness club. Nowadays, these exercise enthusiasts are building muscle. Because the Internet is full of articles about the dangers of losing muscle mass. Grandfathers and grandmothers exercise on exercise machines and gain weight. But they usually disappear after a few lessons. There are three or four grandfathers who have been attending classes at our gym since at least the fall. And a grandmother. Four. The three of them got completely emaciated during training, their skin sagging because they did something wrong and burned out the last of their muscles.

The fourth one seems to have figured out what to do. He works out hard and drinks a lot of protein shakes. I see that I have gained weight as a result of months of training. And the grandfather is at least seventy-five years old. I don’t think it is beneficial to gain weight and strain the kidneys at this age.

Oh yes, such old men are sure to shake their necks. In every large gym there is a machine that, in my opinion, disables only hardworking grandparents: you need to press your head on a special pillow, like pumping your neck. I would ban this.

But mostly grandfathers are flat. Grandmothers have a different idea – they all swim.

In addition, they swim comfortably in the pool for a maximum of 20-30 minutes and perform their procedures for another two hours. I have always known and regretted such obese old women: the only benefit of their trips to the pool is that they actually walk to the pool. But it does a lot of harm. After swimming like turtles for a while, they are fried in saunas! Reds are coming out. Some people go to the gym for the sauna: they came, showered, swam four lanes and steamed. What kind of health is this murder?

There is also another group that kills itself; men experiencing the last hormonal surge… These are fifty years old. Victims of relationships with young women. They do this desperately. As a rule, this ends badly: joints fly, retina peels off, heartbeat skips.

There are victims in our living room. In the autumn, one of them came to work. He looked great in his early fifties: slim and with the strong legs of a runner. She started to shake. Drink protein. Dimensions are distributed month by month. The face swelled, gained not only muscles but also fat. The skin color worsened, swelling appeared. During finals, I ran into him at our clinic to see the cardiologist. And make no mistake, he was such a handsome man…

Things are tough with fitness in general today. On the one hand, subscriptions are getting cheaper in big cities and more and more people can afford to exercise. On the other hand, no one is watching people. There are few coaches; More and more often these are yesterday’s visitors who attend short-term courses within the club network. They don’t see grandfathers bending their necks on exercise machines and getting hernias. And no one cares about grandmothers in steam rooms. As a result, seemingly good success (fitness being universally available) shortens the lifespan of others.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.