January 31, 2025 At the Gym A Journey Through Four Gyms By Vivian Hu Public gym in Taipei. Screenshot from Google Maps. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. The Instagram Trainer I met him online, at a vulnerable moment, during one of the worst winters of my life. It was a year into the pandemic and I had just moved to Upstate New York for graduate school, which was being held over Zoom, and I was going through a breakup. A friend of a friend had been working out with him IRL and had reposted a few of his stories. Out of curiosity, I’d clicked on his profile—@bootiesbyarthur. “NJ’s PERSONAL TRAINER, Hour glass specialist ⏳🍑,” his bio read. His profile was full of videos of ample-buttocked women doing jump squats and hip thrusts. “TRANSFORMATION WEDNESDAYS 🔥💪,” one post read, featuring before-and-after photos of a young, ethnically ambiguous woman in a bikini. Men lie, Women lie, RESULTS DON’T LIE. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending #tranformationwednesday #fitnessmotivation #personaltrainer #girlsthatlift #slimthickfit #gymmotivation Arthur worked primarily out of a shared gym space in New Jersey where he trained dozens of people regularly, but he also did online and in-home coaching around the tristate area. Because I was not local, he recommended I sign up for his online program. For $200 a month, I received a weekly workout plan (“DAY 1: LEGS, DAY 2: UPPER-BODY DAY, 1 DAY OFF,” et cetera), diet plan, and one thirty-minute combined check-in and workout session over FaceTime per month. I could purchase additional workout sessions at a cost of thirty dollars per meeting. In Arthur’s workout plan, “LEG DAY” meant goblet squats, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions (via a leg-extension machine), and hamstring curls. “UPPER-BODY DAY” included dumbbell shoulder presses, dumbbell bicep curls, single-arm dumbbell low rows, planks, and leg lifts, and each exercise was customizable. I ordered a set of dumbbells, and when I told Arthur that the university gym was still shut down, he gave me substitute exercises—Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells instead of the leg extensions and step-ups instead of the hamstring curls—that I could do at home instead. Arthur told me to text him anytime with questions—“Legit 24/7 at your service : )”—and to let him know each time I completed a workout. Before my first session, I sent him my “before” photos, as instructed. Using the self-timer on my phone, I photographed myself in my underwear from the back, side, and front—and in response he emailed me a motivational message. “First day today ! Video your workouts and tag meeee i wanna see how you’re form and tempo 🙂 kill it .” Read More
January 31, 2025 At the Gym At the Sauna: Dispatch from Eternity (Age Thirty-Two) By Jordan Castro Infrared reflectogram detail of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. As a teen, the distance between the present and future was mysterious and unbreachable. Parental appeals to the future didn’t work. “Think of the future,” they said. But I couldn’t. I could picture a red bird. I could picture a lampstand. But the future? It was a phenomenological impossibility. Once the prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction in the brain have developed, it’s easier to imagine the mental states of others, or to imagine what your perspective, as a fictional Other, might be like one day. But in young teens, this capacity is still developing, so the future is a rush of action and anxiety—the future is the present moment—always unfolding as it’s being lived out, experienced in hazy and semi-articulate ways. When you are thirteen, you are not thirty-two. But when you’re thirty-two, you’re also not thirteen. And this is similarly hard to understand. Read More
January 30, 2025 At the Gym The Equinox on Orchard Street By Cara Schacter It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. I’m on my hands and knees in the stretching corner of the Equinox on Orchard Street, doing a fifteen-minute full-body low-impact workout from goop’s YouTube channel, posted in the spring of 2020, which is when G. Sport collaborated with Proenza Schouler to make chafe-proof leggings, so, at the end of the video, after the instructor says “Namaste,” she adds, “and I just want to point out this cute set that I’m wearing.” But first, at the beginning, she says: “Everyone look down at your fingers. Press the floor away.” I’m in dolphin shorts and a front-closure sports bra with a ruched design that’s hard to explain: a gathering—a pinching—of fabric, not exactly in the interval between my breasts but on the verge of it. This is happening on each breast, separately, so there are two gatherings of fabric pinching at this near-interstitial point, radiating away from the sternum toward the nipple—each gathering going toward its own nipple—so the gatherings are mirror images moving in polar directions from the foot of their respective breast, so the effect of each pinched part, the severity of its folds, dissipates over the course of the cup. Think of a seashell. Don’t think of a conch. In fact, forget, for now, about univalve mollusks entirely. Think of Shell, the oil company, and The Birth of Venus, how incremental calcium deposits create a ribbed surface to stabilize the scallop on shifting sand with radial undulations progressively tightening in a quickened up-down pattern until its downward dips disappear, the ridges becoming a briefly singular swollen point as the shell folds into its umbo. Read More
January 29, 2025 At the Gym The Last Day of His Life By J. D. Daniels Photograph by Santeri Viinamäki, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. My father wanted to be a gym teacher before his life drove him down another path. The ghost of his ambition has played a part in how much the gym and my gym teachers have meant to me. Two examples: One. Have you read J. G. Ballard’s 1968 short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”? When Ronald Reagan, whom I would actually prefer not to fuck, revived the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, the chin-up requirement was an intimidating challenge for the kids at my elementary school. But my father had been the pull-up champion of his Air Force unit and I’d always had a bar and brackets in my bedroom doorway, not for exercise but as something to play on and have fun with. Fat Geoff and Tall Jeff and Eric and Dena and Tony and Jenny and Jamie and Matt and Amy and Ryan and Janelle (who was as tall as a giraffe, hence her nickname “Girelle”) and Little Brad and Sara and Big Peaky and Little Peaky and Chad and Brooke would come over, and when we weren’t playing Atari we would do skin-the-cats or Tarzan swings on a sturdy yellow tie strap my father had brought home from the dealership. I was not intimidated by the bar. Read More
January 28, 2025 At the Gym Naval Support Basketball By Joseph Earl Thomas Basketball gym, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. The main problem with Philadelphia, the city where I was born—after the shootings and the homelessness, the racial segregation and social neglect, beyond Roosevelt Boulevard and that SEPTA station at Bridge and Pratt, past all the crack and heroin and percs, the mad-cute pigeons disrespected at every angle, and that ludicrously antihuman attempt to build a new Sixers stadium on top of Chinatown—is the simple fact that, were you a wayward youth in Philly sometime in the dead of winter, you’d be hard-pressed to find a holding place, least of all one where you could participate in that so-called bedrock of black-boy sociality, a simple game of pickup basketball. All summer, every summer, my friends and I would camp out at the courts up and down Northeast Philly but once our fingers started to freeze within the first sixty seconds, it was curtains for the idea that ball is, was, or would ever be life. That is, until we joined the army. I say “we” because of the few years before and after graduating from high school or dropping out for a GED, during which it felt like everyone I knew had given up on that false promise of attaining the good life by working harder or more often at horrible jobs. You would get shot at or yelled at or beaten up for the crime of going outside, anyway, even if you were minding your own business. And all jobs were the same, would always be the same, but at least this one had a Tricare health plan and $400,000 in life insurance; you could ensure that your whole-ass family had access to nine-minute passive-aggressive meetings with a physician for $201.00 a month with little, if any, co-pay. By comparison, I now pay a $700 monthly insurance premium, and, even when I find a doctor who accepts it, another $4,000 a year in co-pays. The benefits of enlistment were like many other forms of coercion under the guise of choice. Read More
January 27, 2025 At the Gym Cruising at the LA Fitness By Danez Smith Entryway to an LA Fitness. Photograph by Mike Mozart, via Wikimedia Commons. . Licensed under CC BY 2.0. It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym. Before the sweat, before the bench press, before the sauna, before the shower, before placing my hand around a man, inside a man, around his throat so desperate for my hand, I take off my ring. While walking up to the doors of LA Fitness, I tuck the proof of my husband into my fanny pack. *** I’ve been to LA Fitness franchises in Philly, in Portland, in Atlanta, in Chicago. Everywhere you go, you enter the same space: there are the same inoffensive beige carpets; the same large stock photos of the same white man and woman, who, like static, photocopied gods, with their quaint and creepy smiles, watch over you from the walls; the same words, like success and motivation, floating between them. This is what we are here to aspire toward: to be successful, to be in shape, to be sculpted into something worth being wanted, something out of Hollywood, something boring, sexy, white, and American. Read More