O utdoor runners have got their euphoria. In every other setting, exercise unleashes a load of more complicated emotions, many of them very strong. To be a novice in a class or at the gym is to be in an extremely vulnerable state: one mean look can send you home, a clique of friends can make you feel like an outsider.
When you know what you’re doing, it fills you with a powerful self-satisfaction, but when you have an environment in which half the people are poleaxed by insecurity, and the other half are much too secure, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Nobody can change that, but etiquette does help. Here are the experts’ rules on the etiquette of fitness environments.
In the gym If you don’t know how to use it, ask someone Anna Jenkins, 51, is the founder of We Are Fit Attitude, with decades of personal training experience. She asked her clients and trainers for some gym etiquette tips. One woman said: “I was too proud to ask questions about how to use certain equipment so I just avoided it.
In actual fact, I probably should have just asked the bodybuilders as I am sure they would have been happy to show me.” You get shy around the equipment, and then you resent the people hogging it, and then you go home. That is not a fitness journey.
Don’t hog the machines If you’re doing it right, you’ll be resting between sets anyway. “Instead of just sitting there, scrolling on your phone,” Jenkins says, “why not get up and help Janet set up so she can do her s.
