Pass the Linament
by Stig

When you are young and want to exercise, the simple thing to do is meet up with a few like-minded people and kick a football around for a couple of hours. At school, we used to spend lunchtime piling around the field, committing ourselves enthusiastically to knee-high tackles and ostentatious goal celebrations, to chasing the one lad with “genuine pace” (as Alan Hansen would call it) down the wing or making the long trudge around the perimeter fence to collect the ball given a Heskey-heave onto the road by some guileless donkey. We easily covered the eight or so kilometres in a lunch hour that the pampered professionals boast about today. We would then be forced to come out of the hot sun into a gloomy classroom, bringing with us the unmistakeable musk of the hormonal teenager, which would appear to excite our pederastic French teacher into visible arousal.

But before this becomes just a conventional story of “jumpers for goalposts” or “prefects for enforced-fellatio”, the point is communal exercise is happily available to all at a young age. Even at university there are countless team sports and high levels of participation, not just involving pumped-up public schoolboys with no social skills or hairy-legged lesbians ( or “hockey players”) out for some same-sex contact.

However, what happens outside of academic institutions? It is much harder to commit to a social organisation like a sporting team. We are left with the prospect of solitary exercise and are told, inaccurately: if you feel unhealthy, the gym’ll fix it.

‘Statistics show that a man who exercises regularly is nearly five times more likely to want to have sex in front of a mirror, grimacing heroically at himself’

But, of course, it won’t. It will turn you into one of two things: a chiselled, lonely, narcissistic automaton; or an obstinately saggy blob with a guilty conscience, and a locker somewhere festering with once-used kit. The majority of people clearly fall into the latter category: the only pounds they are losing are the eighty or so that comes out of their bank every month. How do I prove this assertion? Two common trends of the last ten years are the rise in obesity and the rise of gym membership, which would suggest that people are joining a gym and then celebrating with a year-long chocolate-and-cheese binge. People are paying for fitness, then succumbing to fatness.

And that may not be entirely a bad thing. The gym-fanatic is not an attractive beast. Statistics show that a man who exercises regularly is nearly five times more likely to want to have sex in front of a mirror, grimacing heroically at himself while flexing his shoulder muscles and pounding self-absorbedly away at his unpleasured partner. In the gym, he will walk around in a vest one size too small, shorts so short that they are designed only to provide sweaty-testicle support, and a pair of goalkeeping gloves with the fingers cut off pointlessly at the ends. Despite looking like someone who has had to take what kit he can find out of the lost-property box, our man will be posing so close to a mirror that he will be able to see the beads of spermy-textured protein drink clinging to the hairs of his upper lip.

‘Like marriage, it is a vastly expensive way to feel bad about yourself.’

The same is true to a certain extent for the women members (especially in the hairy upper lip department). Except for the podgy first-timers – plumped up with enthusiasm and trans-fats, making probably their only visit for the year – the gym will be dominated by hardened exercise Nazis, who have grimly sweated off all fat and femininity in equal measure.

Most importantly, no-one in the gym will be enjoying themselves or acting in a sociable fashion. Gym owners have tried to combat this with the introduction of group exercise classes, given butchly exciting names like “Body Pump” and “Body Combat”. But the result is still a room full of individuals – unappealing women plus one gay man – miserably aware of how ridiculous they look in front of each other, as they are forced sweatily to wobble around to European house music. They come to realise that, even within a group, going to the gym is a solitary, penitential experience. It is inconvenient and uncomfortable. Like marriage, it is a vastly expensive way to feel bad about yourself.

The solution to all this, I think, is to seek to reclaim competitive team sport as an activity for the over-25 and turn the gym into a training camp purely for fatties. Doctors could then consign large people to gym attendance for prescribed periods to get them in shape for more sociable and sustainable exercise. They will become no-gateau ghettoes, places where the obese can help each other to become normal contributing members of society again.

Outside of these grim fat camps, everyone else will have to throw themselves into sporting activity in order to keep in shape. Five-aside football would then be elevated from its current status as an elaborate excuse for ten pikeys to kick each other; rugby clubs would only be allowed to field boring, balding bankers desperate to relive an athletic youth they never had; tennis might no longer be the preserve of the promiscuous suburban middle-class. Britain would become a truly sporting nation, and we could go back to laughing smugly at the Americans for being the clumpingly overweight disgraces that they are. A win-win situation, I am sure you’ll agree. Unless you really do have glandular problems.