Picture the scene: you enter a warehouse-like building, plugged into blaring music, go on some machines, grunt, sweat, then go back to your day.
Exercise, a once-natural phenomenon, is now an extra we must fit in around increasingly consuming careers amid a cost of living crisis. Even when we make it through our set at the harsh, mechanised gym, we leave without achieving any tangible outcome, having expended energy with no profit made. When we truly pause to think about the concept of gyms, we begin to see how peculiar and almost dystopian they seem, with exercise reduced to just another task on the to-do list, rather than something intertwined to our existence.
Of course, in urban areas – where space, time, and routine make passive forms of exercise difficult – gyms were, and are, a plausible solution which fits into workers’ busy lifestyles. The transition from traditional sports and labour to a simulation of these tasks is clearly an efficient and necessary evolution. Especially in a time where obesity, mental health and hustle culture are universal problems, gyms position themselves as a seemingly positive solution.
However, we must ask ourselves if this somewhat artificial replication of exercise is a true solution or if it is a stopgap to the problematic world we have created, where exercise is a luxury, not a natural part of our lives. By exploring this, we begin to question if this ingenious innovation is simply fixing something that wasn’t broken in the first place.
The strangeness of gyms primarily lies in the fact that they are indoors, and often experienced with no connection to other people. Despite burning the same calories or lifting the same weight, exercising in this way doesn’t allow us to achieve many of the added benefits that authentic exercise establishes. Exercising in natural environments significantly reduces rumination and blood pressure faster than identical workloads performed indoors, for example. This shows a clear benefit to past ways of movement where exercise would be integrated, meaningful, and inseparable from everyday life rather than being something we must schedule and pay for. This emphasizes the plague of our modern world, where every aspect of our lives must be manufactured and monetized.
The commercialisation of gyms is unmatched, with exercise being an industry subject to a myriad of consumer traps and incentives. We see this through memberships which turn fitness into a recurring financial commitment as opposed to a natural human activity. Fitness companies’ business models perfectly encapsulate how gyms overcomplicate and monopolise something that was once simple, dangerously leading us to a point where the product is so far removed from the initial concept, it is almost unrecogniseable.
This alarming realisation leaves us with a final question: have we gone too far or is this simply an essential evolution of exercise? More importantly, where does this evolution stop before we allow it to mutate into something obscure and dystopian?
We must not blindly accept the subtle, but damaging changes instigated by corporations and instead must dare to question this culture which prioritises gym ‘progress’ over more meaningful aspects of life.
Gyms are simultaneously a positive contribution to society and a concerning symptom of an increasingly capitalist world. Whether you are a die-hard gym bro or gym hater, it is important to take a moment to examine how strange a concept gyms actually are and stop to realise that maybe the dystopia isn’t the gym itself, but the world that made the gym necessary.
