12 People At The Gym We Love To Hate

You'd Better Not Be One Of These 12 Gym Types

I’ve been working out at various gyms for about 18 years now. I’ve been to high-end health clubs and grubby little basements and everything in between, in at least 40 cities spanning five countries and two cruise ships.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting people in that time.

Most people at various gyms don’t fit into any category other than “regular.” There is nothing specifically identifying about them. They’re just average folks at the gym. Then there are those who do fit into a specific group. Here are the ones that come to mind from my many hours of people-watching while pumping iron:

1. The Maggot Gagger

This is always a guy. Women can get a bit of body odor, but only a man can smell so bad that the stench could knock over the guy who cleans the bathrooms at Taco Bell and leave a bad taste in your mouth for an hour afterward. I think gyms should have a stink detector alarm and security personnel who escort such offenders off the premises in as humiliating a manner as possible.

It’s the only way they’ll learn.

2. The Compensating for Something-ers

These are men. Well, boys actually. They travel in packs of three to five. They don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They show up and believe the goal of weight lifting is to show off for their friends by lifting as much weight as they can by whatever means necessary. The concept of proper lifting technique never occurs to them. They hover together around one bench and spend about 10 percent of their time lifting and the rest shouting encouragement to their brainless buddies who are doing the funky chicken in an effort to lift far more weight than they are capable of.

Natural selection should take care of them in due course.

3. Miss Mountain Lion

Also known as the cougar. These women know stuff. You can see it in their eyes. They’ll hurt you if you give them the chance, and I’m not talking about your feelings. They’re usually in really good shape, although parts of them are plastic and there has certainly been some strategic nipping and tucking going on. They often look amazing from the neck down, but the face is difficult to discern through the layers of makeup. I can envision how the next morning could be a frightening experience.

Many of them work hard with weights. They can lift as well as most men. Like I said, they’ll hurt you.

They hunger. Fear them.

4. Hoop Earring Girl

She’s under 25. She’s hot. She knows this. She never makes eye contact with anyone. She wears expensive and tight-fitting gym attire that show off a figure that has not yet experienced the ravages of gravity. Her hair and makeup are done to perfection. She also wears jewelry — even perfume — to the gym. She wears headphones to tune out would-be suitors. She doesn’t want to talk to you. She pretends she doesn’t see you drooling over her.

She shows up, does 15 minutes at low intensity on a stair-climber — hardly enough to break a sweat — stretches a little, then leaves. If she keeps going to the gym, eventually she will transform into Miss Mountain Lion.

5. The Screamer

These are the guys who, while lifting, sound like they’re either giving birth to a harbor seal or getting a colonoscopy from a guy operating a jackhammer.

6. Señor Spandex

Also known as TMI guy. It’s just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

7. The Tsunami

This guy shows up sweaty. By the time he’s done, he is a walking puddle of protoplasm. Sometimes he is also a Maggot Gagger.

8. The Wife Beater

The guy wearing a snug, white, ribbed tank top. Mullet optional.

9. The Juicer

Usually male, but not always. They tend to hang out in hardcore gyms that cater to their lifestyle of injecting whatever toxic concoction they can get their hands on in an effort to build mass.

They look like aliens. When not at the gym, they can be seen hanging out on the cover of magazines that have the word “muscle” in the title.

10. Impacted Colon Guy

Well, judging by the weird way he struts around the gym, there has to be something shoved up there. This guy is often also a Screamer and possibly a Juicer.

11. The Just Shut the Hell Up Already-er

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. If they spent as much time working their muscles as they did their jaws, then they’d be huge.

12. The Strong Man

He’s at least 50. He has a moustache, but not the fabulous Freddy Mercury kind; more the “I don’t give a crap what you think about my face” kind. He’s got a sizable gut. Every meal he eats includes either bacon or beef. He looks like a myocardial infarction waiting to happen.

He can bench-press you and your entire family.

He doesn’t talk to anyone. As far as he’s concerned, there isn’t anyone at the gym worthy of his attention. He’s been lifting since Schwarzenegger wore short pants, and he makes everyone else look feeble by comparison.

Try not to piss him off.

If you’ve ever spent time in a gym, you have noticed it's a place where interesting characters can congregate. I’ve made past attempts to classify the various subspecies of gym-goer (here and here), but my work is not yet complete. Some of these characters can be considered annoying, others unusual or simply amusing. These are the people at the gym.

13. The Gun Show

Always male and with a tendency to like the same (or so I’ve been told). These guys could have a myocardial-infarction-waiting-to-happen-sized gut and a flatter-than-a-Dungeon-Master’s ass, and they do not care. They are there to pump up the gun show: biceps and triceps. Well, mostly just biceps. Their workout routine: Show up in sleeveless shirt, do arm work, leave.

14. The Resolved

These people show up in early January full of fire and enthusiasm. They’ve got a new workout wardrobe and a hyperactive personal trainer barely out of high school whose other job is waiting tables at Applebee's. This person works hard for a few sessions before the pain, sweat, injuries and time pressures begin to compound. Most of them don’t survive past two months, and yet, like a phoenix, shall be reborn and arise from ashes gray the following January.

15. Charlie Sheen

The guy who is so obviously hung over it’s impossible to imagine how his heart would continue to beat without the several lines of blow he did in the parking lot to make it through this workout. You can see the stink lines of sour booze wafting out of his pores and the Grim Reaper stalking him from the shadows.

16. Marge Simpson

She’s the harried mom. She’s got baby puke on her wrinkled Lululemon, makeup on only half her face, an errant curler stuck in her hair, a piece of toilet paper trailing from her runner and bags under her eyes with a haunted look like a grunt coming home from back-to-back tours in the Nam. She zooms in and out quickly before the toddler goes apoplectic and so she can make sure the older kids make it on time to singing/soccer/football/piano/karate, that the dog gets neutered, the house gets cleaned before dinner is made and the plumber…

17. The Slimer

You know that classic scene from the movie Ghostbusters when Bill Murray’s character gets “slimed?” This is what the bench looks like after he’s used it. And, no, he doesn’t clean it off. There is a special level in hell for these folks.

18. The WTF-Are-You-Doing? Guy

Seriously, who does some kind of one-legged Superman maneuver on a Bosu while holding kettlebells? In what retarded universe does that make sense? Oh, yeah, the universe in which your gullibility prompted you to buy a new car’s worth of personal training stuff and the trainer just ran out of ideas for new stuff to show you. That one.

19. Same Shirt Guy

We could give him the benefit of the doubt. We could say that he has several of the exact same T-Shirt at home or that he does his laundry every single day. But we’d know this would not be true. We know it’s not true because of the way he gets smellier and smellier as the week progresses. Then his mom finally peels the microbe-infested “most favorite shirt” off his back and washes it and the cycle can begin anew.

20. The Chiropractor’s Dream

Everything on her is tight and tiny except for the implants, which could save a drowning man. Regardless of the time spent on a rowing machine to compensate, her vertebrae are slowly, inexorably being pulled out of alignment from the mighty weight of her chest.

21. The Tuff Guy

He’s the one with a variety of T-Shirts that say things like “TapouT” on them. I’ll just quote Chris Shugart, who said it best: “Unless you fight in the sport, you don't do MMA. You're just a guy with a large collection of douche-y T-shirts.”

22. We Are Borg

Their workout is planned down to the second, the rep and the pound using some convoluted iPad app. Resistance is futile.

23. The Babysat

The people whose personal trainers act more like a psychologists and who are utterly incapable of exercise without having their hands held by a training babysitter every step of the way.

24. Naked Locker Room Guy

You’ve seen him. He’s old. He’s flabby. And he’s damn proud of what’s flopping out of the graying mass of pubic hair. Recall what he looks like. Picture his nakedness in your mind. Now go out and enjoy the rest of your day.