The Better Life Perspective
Feeling uncomfortable in a gym does not necessarily mean you lack confidence, fitness or experience. More often, the difficulty comes from walking into an environment filled with small uncertainties: where to go, what to use, how something works, whether everybody else already knows the rules and what you are supposed to do next. The useful thing about that is that uncertainty is considerably easier to solve than confidence. You do not need to wait until you somehow feel like a gym person before you begin. Give yourself a plan, remove enough of the unknowns and repeat the experience a few times and the place that once made you feel like a visitor can quite quickly become simply somewhere you train.
The Better Life Founders Journal
The Gym Isn’t Intimidating. Not Knowing What Happens Next Is.
I was reminded recently that you do not have to be new to exercise to experience what has rather neatly become known as gymtimidation.
I had joined a new gym and decided to try one of its spin classes for the first time, which, viewed objectively, should have been about as comfortable an introduction as I could have chosen. I cycle regularly both on and off road, spend much of the winter training at home indoors and usually have several months of fairly purposeful preparation behind me before heading away each summer to ride in the mountains, so sitting on a stationary bike and being asked to pedal hard was hardly unfamiliar territory.
Yet when I walked towards that studio for the first time, I still noticed the faint unease that comes with not quite knowing what happens next.
Which bike do people normally take? How early does everybody arrive? Is there some particular way these bikes are adjusted? Where do people leave their belongings? Does everybody else already know the instructor and the format of the session? None of these questions mattered very much and none of them had anything remotely to do with my ability to ride a bike, but together they created that small feeling of being somewhere other people seemed to understand better than I did.
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What If You Knew What Happened Next?
Tell Coach Max where you are training, how much time you have and what you would like to work on, then let him help remove the decisions and uncertainties standing between you and getting started.
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The bike was not intimidating, but the unknowns were.
I suspect that distinction explains much of what people experience when they feel uncomfortable entering a gym, particularly if they are returning to exercise after several years away, joining somewhere new or venturing into a part of the building they have never used before. The classic image of gym intimidation may involve a room full of enormous people lifting enormous weights, but in reality it can be much subtler than that. It is wondering whether you are using a machine correctly, feeling unsure where to stand, not wanting to look lost or walking into a class where everybody else appears to know one another.
None of that is dramatic enough to sound like a serious obstacle, yet human behaviour is full of small frictions that change what we do and staying home can suddenly feel much easier than entering a room in which we are uncertain of ourselves.
What happened in my spin class was equally instructive because almost all of that discomfort disappeared within minutes. I adjusted the bike, the instructor began talking and suddenly I no longer needed to understand the room because somebody else was guiding me through it. I simply rode.
The second visit was easier because I knew where the bikes were and how they worked. The next one was easier again because I recognised the instructor and understood the broad shape of the class, until very quickly the studio stopped feeling like somewhere new and became somewhere I went to train.
Nothing dramatic had happened to my confidence. Familiarity had simply removed most of the things I had been uncertain about.
Perhaps Confidence Comes Afterwards
We often talk about confidence as though it is a prerequisite for action, something you need to somehow develop before walking through the door, but I think exercise provides a useful reminder that confidence very often arrives in the opposite order.
You do something while feeling slightly uncertain, discover that nothing terrible happened, return and understand a little more, then repeat the process until the environment no longer asks much of you psychologically.
That suggests a more practical approach to gymtimidation than simply telling someone to be more confident or reassuring them that nobody is watching. The latter may be true and most people in a gym are considerably more concerned with their own session than yours, but knowing that does not tell you what to do when you get there.
Certainty does.
If you are going to use the weights area, arrive knowing broadly what the session contains rather than expecting yourself to invent it while standing among unfamiliar equipment. Your first workout does not need to be ambitious. Thirty minutes, five or six movements and a clear idea of what comes first may be considerably more useful than an elaborate programme that creates yet another thing to understand.
This is also where having Coach Max with you on your phone becomes genuinely useful.
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Put a Personal Trainer in Your Pocket
Take Coach Max into the gym with you and let him guide the session around the time you have, the equipment available and what you want to improve, whether you prefer to use voice or simply type or swipe between exercises.
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Imagine walking into the weights area knowing very little about the room but being able to tell Max that you have thirty minutes, would like an uncomplicated upper-body session and are still getting used to the gym. He can give you the first movement, then the next, adapt the session if a particular machine is occupied and explain an exercise if you are not sure what he means.
That changes the experience in a subtle but important way because you no longer need to know everything before beginning.
The thought that so often creates hesitation — I don’t really know what I’m doing — becomes something much more manageable: I only need to know what I’m doing next.
This is the part of the personal trainer role that I have become increasingly interested in through my own strength training with Max. A good human trainer can obviously offer things an AI coach cannot, particularly observing technique in person, spotting movement issues and physically demonstrating something when that matters, but there is another valuable part of personal training that is simply having somebody else carry the structure of the session.
They decide what happens next, remove the pauses in which you start negotiating with yourself and allow you to concentrate on the actual training rather than administering the training.
For somebody who feels unsure entering a gym, that is potentially even more valuable because Max becomes a quiet source of certainty in an environment that otherwise contains quite a lot of unknowns.
Classes May Be Easier Than They Look
There is also an interesting irony in the way many people think about exercise classes because they can appear considerably more intimidating than exercising alone, particularly when you imagine walking into a room where everybody already seems to know the instructor, the equipment and one another.
Yet once you have crossed that threshold, classes actually remove much of the uncertainty.
You no longer need to decide which exercise comes next, how long to do it for or whether you have done enough because somebody else carries all of that thinking. Your job is simply to participate at a level that is appropriate for you.
The useful first step is not therefore to arrive determined to prove that you belong there. Arrive a little early, tell the instructor it is your first session, ask anything you need to know about the equipment and deliberately give yourself permission to take the class more gently than you eventually might. Your first objective can simply be to learn the room.
Coach Max can help before you get there too. If you are considering your first spin, Pilates, circuit or strength class, ask what you are likely to encounter, what you might need to bring, how early to arrive and what it would be useful to tell the instructor. A few minutes of preparation can remove a surprising amount of uncertainty before you have even left home.
And perhaps that is the wider lesson. Gymtimidation does not always need a grand intervention in self-confidence. Sometimes it simply needs enough information, enough guidance and enough repetition for an unfamiliar place to stop feeling unfamiliar.
The first visit may still feel slightly uncomfortable. By the third you know where things are. After several more you know how the place works and very soon there may be no internal conversation at all, you simply arrive and train.
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Make the Gym Somewhere You Belong
Tell Coach Max what makes the gym feel uncomfortable, what you already know and what you would like to achieve, then let Better Life help you prepare for the first visit, guide you through the workout and remove the uncertainty.
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The Better Life Founders Journal
Written after discovering that several years of riding bikes up mountains still did not prevent me wondering what everybody else already seemed to know before my first spin class.