Gymtimidation

At 6’3” (190 cm), somewhere between 185 and 200 pounds depending on the season and my current training goals (that’s 84-91 kg, give or take a biscuit), with a mostly-gray beard, crows feet at the corners of my eyes, tattoos on my arms, and a fair amount of muscle, I probably don’t look like someone who might walk through the world with anxiety or self doubt. 

The phenomenon of being a new person in gyms, unsure how to use machines or barbells and dumbbells and kettlebells, feeling isolated, and wondering whether everyone else is laughing at us, is a common enough experience that there’s even a shorthand term for it, which I’ve used as the title of this post: gymtimidation. The intimidation one feels about going to or being in the gym, as an inexperienced newcomer.

Ten years ago, that was me.

Those of us who encourage others to accept, confront, and work through this feeling are apt to say various things that are meant to be either comforting or encouraging. Here’s one: “most people in the gym aren’t paying attention to you.”

True! Most people are there to do their own workout, and the more intense it is, or the more serious they are about it, the less time they have for anything else.

But what about the people who ARE paying attention to you? After all, it doesn’t take many people pointing and laughing, or making unkind comments about us to each other, to put us back into any painful doubts or feelings we walked in with.

That’s what we worry about, isn’t it? It isn’t usually just the idea that people might be unkind. It’s the way we fear that their judgment is somehow true to our own worries. That their nastiness is accurate to our self-doubts.

So when kinder gym people go on with “ … and anybody who does pay attention to you is probably not a serious gym goer themselves, so their opinion is trash” or “actually, most serious gym people LOVE to see new folks getting their bearings, we remember being that person, we believe in the power of health and fitness, we might leave you alone rather than intrude on your personal space but inside we might be cheering you on,” and the rest of it (yes, I’ve said all the things meant to defuse the power we might be tempted to give those unkind people, and I’ve meant them, because I think they’re true) … when we say all those things, I’m sure we do reassure some people. Yay!

But what if you’re reading this and still have anxieties?

Let’s get real: some of us walk into gyms worried about stares or judgment or giggling *because we’ve already had them happen*.

Hi. I’m waving at you. It happened to me.

I’m going to tell you what I had to work through to deal with my own gymtimidation.

At the end of the story, you may only feel that I’m one of those annoying people who says “I succeeded and so can you!” But what I hope to do is let you know that it’s possible, and worth it, because YOU are worth it. Just like I am. But also that I never ever underestimate the power of real teasing, and real internalized self-doubt or anxiety, to hold us back. It did for me, for a long, long, long time. If you struggle with it, I will never minimize the reality of that struggle.

I got my adult height pretty young. By 11 or 12, I was approaching 5’9” (175 cm for readers who use metric), which matched my father’s adult height. And I just kept going. By 16, when I got my first driver’s license, I was 6’2”/188 cm.

Growing that tall that fast made it difficult to eat enough for anything other than getting taller, at least in my family where money was occasionally tight and my parents weren’t apt to spend it on snack foods that might have supplied extra calories.

So the kid I want you to imagine in gym classes, in his teens when lots of us are shy about our changing bodies and some of us are also pretty savage with our opinions about each other, was this lanky, slender, weedy young man. Who had never been into sports much anyway, had already been the kid last picked in elementary school, and so on.

(I was also beginning to realize that I wasn’t straight, but as much as I want other queer folks to understand how that impacted me, I also want straight folks to hear and remember that our teens can feel awkward for all kinds of reasons, and if yours did, that’s important too. It’s not all about being a specific kind of social outsider, it’s also about our sense of self. We self-doubt for all kinds of reasons at that age.)

Puberty hit me at about the usual time, but some of its effects didn’t occur right away. Body hair, for one. That gray beard I’m proud of started off blond, but it also didn’t really come in until my late twenties. Roll the film back to my teens, and I looked somewhat hairless. Some of the other boys were already shaving.

I also had nothing of what we might call “fashion sense.” (Sorry to challenge any fantasies about the gay guy who always dressed impeccably.)

So the summer before my freshman year of high school, knowing that gym classes would be coming around again and having a smidge of my own money to spend, I bought a couple of new pairs of gym shorts at the local sporting goods place downtown. (Something else relevant: we had only moved to this town about a year before, and I was already not fitting in well.)

This was 1977. Boy’s and men’s gym shorts could be pretty damn short in that era. Those are the ones I got. I don’t recall thinking much about it. If I had to guess, I probably told myself “If these are being sold, then that’s what we’re supposed to be wearing, right?” I may just have picked the first thing I saw.

When I tell you I was inexperienced and socially awkward, I mean it. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to think ahead about “Is there a way to dress that will help me fit in best?” (More on THAT later.)

That fall, in I walked to gym class, in my short shorts.

The shortest ones any boy was wearing. WAY shorter.

With my skinny legs, which were either hairless or (I’m pretty sure) a bit fuzzy, but with light blond hair that didn’t show up against my rather pale skin.

The teasing was almost instantaneous.

Is “Nair” still a thing? The hair-removal cream marketed (mostly) to women so they have options other than shaving, if they want to remove hair from their legs? (Checks the web: oh look, it’s still being sold!)

Back in the late 1970s (and apparently for many years afterward), Nair ran a series of well-known commercials, featuring women in short shorts or dresses, singing a jaunty jingle: “Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts!”

Guess what got sung in gym class? “Who wears short shorts? Pete wears short shorts!”

Followed by “Pete shaves his leeeeegggggs!”

More than once. Pretty much every day.

I can laugh now. At the time? Fuhgeddaboutit. I was absolutely mortified. It was bad enough that I was already ‘bad at sports’ and ‘hated gym class.’ It was a bit tougher that my dawning sexual orientation pointed me directly at guys with lots of body hair (those of you who know about gay ‘bears’ will know the type). Now I was being openly targeted right where my anxieties about my body, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my physical skills intersected.

Gymtimidation? As another 1970s’ commercial went: you’re soaking in it.

Reader, I cannot tell you that I worked through my feelings in a way that was effective.

I stopped wearing the short shorts to gym. Instead, I wore … an old pair of jeans with holes in the knees. Because FASHION. ;-)

Naturally, the teasing didn’t stop, it just shifted to accommodate this new (and looking back on it, rather bizarre) shift in clothing. I did say I was socially awkward and had no clue about how to fit in!

“Pete wears jeans so we can’t see that he shaves his leeeegggggss!”

Ooof.

When I tell you that I understand how real the fear of being judged in ‘the gym’ goes, I ain’t pulling the wool over your eyes. Nor the ripped jeans. I am the living embodiment of being actually teased in athletic settings.

It would be lovely to tell you that I pulled through, and that the teasing somehow “made me stronger” because it didn’t actually kill me. Over the long, long story of my life, there’s even an element of truth to that.

But to put things in perspective: a year or so after this, I started doing sword fencing through a community program at the local college. And in my junior year of high school, I joined the cross country running team. Some of the kids who had teased me began to see that there was more to me than their previous assumptions. I started making some friends; I got a lot less static from the remaining bullies.

I even started to see myself differently. Clearly I was capable of being athletic, if we defined that more broadly than being good at baseball or football, or climbing the rope in gym class.

I still walked into gyms fearing bullying for, well: decades.

I did walk into gyms, despite those worries, but only in fits and starts. I developed a modicum of self-confidence, sloooooowly. But there’s no law against self-confidence and self-doubt co-existing in the same person. Indeed, I bet most of us live with that combination.

It took me a long time to understand that just because some kids might have started off with more natural skills than me, or grew into their skills younger, or whatever the differences were … that didn’t mean I was permanently deficient. As an adult with plenty of my own accomplishments in life (which includes just BEING ALIVE, accomplishment enough for any of us!), I no longer had to think of myself as an interloper in gyms.

But the old self-doubt died very hard. Not going to lie about that. In fact: although I’ve been pretty self-confident about my abilities through this last decade of intentional, consistent work in the gym and out on the roads on my bicycle … I think this is the first time I’ve unpacked this whole story about the short shorts and the jeans in public. It happened when I was 15 or so; I’m 58 now. Something you’ve kept mum about for over 40 years is probably a sign of a shameful secret. Maybe I’ve discussed it with close friends. But I’m not sure my own siblings know the tale. My parents? Nope: they were the type who would have told me to ‘push through it’ without hearing how difficult it felt (and I certainly wasn’t ready to ‘come out’ to them about bigger topics). My own partner of 25 years may or may not know this.

I internalized the shame HARD.

So when I meet other adults who worry about being ridiculed in the gym: boy, do I NOT dismiss how that feels. I hear you.

If anything, what I want to tell you is: don’t be ashamed of your shame!! Some of us feel this crap more intensely. Who knows why. It’s just something we deal with. You’re okay if you’re not okay. As a veteran of piling on myself about the fact that I was piling on myself, I hereby give you permission to try to break that cycle.

Meanwhile … we only get this one body, and we don’t know how long we’ll have here. I often say, half joking but 100% serious, that the older I got, the more I got tired of my self-doubts. Literally just exhausted by them, and terribly familiar with the voices in my head that said I wasn’t up to par. Familiarity eventually bred contempt. Somehow, I began to talk back to self-doubt, simply because I was pissed off at its persistence.

“This again? Get a life, internal voice of shame. You’re a goddamn broken record. If you can’t come up with new material, I’m going to have to ignore you.”

I don’t know if I can plug that same attitude into anyone else’s head in a useful way. I’m just sharing that it happened for me, and that it has been worth it to get into the gym in spite of all that old pain and damage. I’ve been fortunate, and persistent, enough to reshape my body AND my mind. It has paid huge dividends. I genuinely hope for the same for everyone.

A cluster of personal histories and personal feelings like mine isn’t terribly uncommon in gyms. I have met and talked with a LOT of people whose history of self-doubt you would NEVER guess from the physique they walk around in, or the amount of weight they can lift. If anything, I suspect that many people who spend a lot of time in gyms are working through the remains of those former selves who felt a lot more lost.

It doesn’t take that kind of trauma to get started, though. One doesn’t have to be a mess to take care of oneself better than average: I keep hoping that the average itself will improve as more of us step off the treadmills of ‘normal’ life and pay a bit more attention to ourselves somehow. 

I’m only talking about this at such length because I hope someone will take heart if it lets them know they’re not alone in it.

One can be a lot closer to ‘normal’ and benefit from going to the gym, too.

© 2022 Grampa Fitness

Disclaimer: Ideas expressed in this blog post should not be construed as official advice on how to safely perform fitness activities. Always consult with your doctor and other medical professionals as necessary, before engaging in exercise.