This is a post I've been meaning to make for months, but I was in a prolonged information gathering period. I'm still in it, but I might as well report some initial findings. The theory is to group a majority of health club members into several distinct groups, based on their appearance, behavior, attitude, or some combination of all measured factors. Categories should be easily measurable by laymen, as well as at least mildly amusing. Here are the few I have (with assistance from Malaya) thus far delineated:
Grunters: The first group named an the easiest to classify. These are invariable men, or perhaps boys, mostly in the 16-24 age range. They have some muscles, but often a pot belly to go with it, and they never do any of the cardio machines. What they do is head straight to the weights, where they commence to pump up. What makes them grunters is not that they are beefy, but how they go about getting that way. They mostly do dumb bells, almost exclusively in bicep-building exercises, but it's when they hit the various weight machines that they earn their classification. Grunters are defined, most directly, by high numbers over reps. One will routinely get on the sitting bench press machine, dial it up to 140 pounds, and strain out 3 reps, rest for five minutes while sitting on the machine and keeping anyone else from using it, then manage three more before wandering off, shaking his arms.
They do every machine that way; always moving the weight up to as much as they can possibly lift, never doing more than five reps, and always occuping the machine for at least three times longer than anyone else in the gym would. Needless to say they leave the weight setting as high as they set it, so the next person to come along can't help but notice their mighty strength.
Fortunately for me, I'm neither 18 nor worried about my penis size, which frees me up to set the same machine to 60 or 80 pounds, do my 25 or 30 reps, and move on to something else, all in less than two minutes, and while using far more energy than they did with their Herculean display.
Coasters: The next easily-identifiable group are pretty much the opposite of the Grunters, in behavior. They may sometimes actually be Grunters, but Coasters are defined as people who occupy cardio machines, while never actually doing anything that would give them a workout. I've often done an entire workout; half an hour of running or fast elliptical, 15 weight machines, free weights, stretching, etc, and left while the same Coaster spent the entire time pedaling along on the same exercise bike, reading the same magazine, and never even approaching a sweat. Bikes beneath the ceiling fans and with good sightlines to the televisions are their main concern.
Coasters are often old people, but in those cases it's difficult to be sure of a classification, since they might just be too old and fragile to go any faster. You can be sure you've spotted one when they're young though, and far more interested in walking along and talking to their friend, or reading their magazine, than they are in getting exercise. You'll often see a Coaster walk on a treadmill for an hour, or work the elliptical on zero resistance for 45 minutes, or sit on an exercise bike while moving their legs in a circle, but never at a speed that would burn more calories than they could do on the couch at home. While they can be found on all the machines, they favor the exercise bikes because, duh, they can sit down and thus not even use the energy required to stand up. The bikes have all sorts of digital tours with a variety of hills and such, and I seldom use them, but Coasters all seem to find a course that's got a lot of hills; all of them down.
Free Range Rude: A term stolen directly from Hannibal Lecter, the FRR can be Coasters or Grunters, or any other sort of gym patron. What makes them FRR is their obliviousness to others, and the way they get in your way without even realizing they are doing so. These are the people you get stuck behind in supermarkets when they leave their carts right in the center of a crowded aisle while they browse the boxes of cake mix, or while they greedily gobble down free samples of pretty much anything.
At the gym they are the ones who sit on the same weight machine for 5 or 10 minutes without actually using it more than 5% of that time. Or who get on the good elliptical machines (the ones with the arms that swing) and walk slowly for half an hour, without using their arms for anything more than turning pages in their magazines. Or who spread out their yoga mat and do stretches or sit ups while blocking an aisle.
Their moment of glory though, comes in on the express workout machines. Those are a dozen machines that are set up in a long row, with pneumatic resistance rather than weights. The theory is that you do them all in a row, going for no more than 30 or 40 seconds each, and going as hard and a fast as you can on each, with resistance in both directions, courtesy of the pneumatics. These machines at our gym are all in a row, are color coded, and have stickers on each one saying Express, along with several huge signs and banners hanging from the ceiling above them. They're also the machines you constantly see people working in rapid sequence, heading from one end to the other.
None of these clues tip off the FRR though, or else they wouldn't be FRR. They'll wander right over and plop down on a machine in the center of the Express Station, set to looking over the machine, puzzling at the pneumatic resistance, and so on. All while remaining mercifully oblivious to the annoyed Express workout people who are moving up to their left, machine by machine, and then skipping past them to the next machine, while throwing them dirty looks. The thought process of a FRR: "What a strange machine? However can it work? How odd that other people keep moving past me... I must not be in their way though, or they'd stand and wait for me to finish with this one. I wonder what this dial, numbered 1-6 does, when I turn it? Perhaps it somehow relates to the resistance I feel when I lift the padded bars beside my ears?"
At our gym, the FRR are almost exclusively 50+ y/o white women, though since that describes a large percentage of the white bread suburban gym clientele on the whole, I can't conclude that that demographic is most likely to be a clueless FRR, or if it's just coincidence.
Past Their Prime: This group is quite small at this point, and made up of just two or three men at our gym. They are quite dinstinct though, and their scariness more than offsets their numerical scarcity. The PTP guys are in their 40s, or perhaps early 50s, and they are in great shape for their age. Unfortunately, they still dress like they did when they were 25, in 1978, and are wholly oblivious to how a man of their age looks in short shorts, knee high socks, and a bushy Magnum P.I. moustache.
What looks best on a physically fit man in his early 50s? Dignity.
The sad part is that if these guys had some current workout fashions, or even just plain sweats and a t-shirt, and they could maybe shave, they'd look damn good. The sadder part is that they strut around like peacocks, obviously proud to still be in good shape at their age, and have no idea how ridiculous they look doing it. I see other gym patrons, especially younger women, actually averting their eyes when these guys strike a jaunty pose with a dumbbell, or perch themselves on a weight machine and look around, cleary hoping someone will notice how much metal they're pressing.
PTPs never go anywhere near cardio machines, or break a sweat, needless to say. They may overlap somewhat into Grunter territory too, but their reckless vanity generally sets them apart. That and the fact that they've at least matured enough not to waste their workout doing sets of 3 reps on far, far more weight than they can safely lift.
Other Classifications: These categories are a good start, but there are still many more groups that need to be identified and described. Our gym is near a college, and gets tons of college girls in, but they can't be classified that easily, since they behave in different ways. Their greatest unifying theme is their clothing, which almost invariably includes shorts with a waistband low enough to allow their hip fat jelly roll to flop over. They roll down the waists of their sweats to create this look, if necessary. But other than that, and a generally lackadaisical approach to exercise (hence the jelly rolls), they differ widely. Some actually workout hard, while others treat the gym like study hall, and talk and talk and talk, often while Coasting, as if they had to keep gabbing to kill an hour before they are allowed to go home. Malaya suggested a name with the word "hen" in it, but we haven't figured out a pithy description or non-all-inclusive definition yet.
There are also a lot of older women, 40 and 50-something housewife types, who are usually Coasters, but who sometimes actually workout, though they seem to mostly be there for the spin classes or the yoga classes. They might be classified by their clothing, but many of them manage to blend in pretty well. The occasional 60ish woman in a sports coat is good for a double take, but they're not there often enough to get their own category.
I could probably also create a "No Nonsense" category, to which both Malaya and myself would belong. These are people who enter the gym in their workout clothing, go hard for 45 or 60 minutes, and leave. No socializing, no posing, lots of cardio, weights after that, and so on. Unfortunately there's nothing there really worth joking about or describing, and in fact these people tend to be pretty invisible, since they're constantly moving between stations and aren't preening or taking up more than their share of space and thus coming to the attention of others. Though I and my girlfriend belong to this group, I realize that the gym would be a pretty damn boring place to blog about if everyone else did, too.
If anyone else has any nominations or gym observations, feel free to hit up the comments. I need a few more groups, so I can codify these on a content page, for easy reference.
