Gyms and Fitness

Jules: Hey Nathan, do you go to the gym?

Nathan: Yes, Jules. I do try to but I'm a bit, I don't know what the word is.

Jules: Lazy?

Nathan: Inconsistent. No, thanks very much.

Jules: What do you do at the gym? What do you actually do?

Nathan: What do I do at the gym? I try to work on specific back and lower back muscles but it's quite difficult.

Jules: On a machine or?

Nathan: Well that's the unfortunate part is that the gym that I go to doesn't have a proper barbell so most of it's machine work or...

Jules: Bar bell, is that a thing you lift?

Nathan: Like the big long bar, all the muscle dudes kind of use.

Jules: I don't know much about that kind of stuff.

Nathan: But there's enough and then I usually do like forty five minutes of different lifts and then about an hour kind of stretching afterwards. But, yeah, I don't like the gyms so much, you know.

Jules: Why not? What don't you like about gyms?

Nathan: Number one, I get paranoid.

Jules: Do you?

Nathan: If there's like really muscly guys there or something. I'm like...

Jules: Paranoid or self conscious?

Nathan: Self-conscious maybe yeah. And then the other thing is I find that some gyms are not really gyms. They're just socializing places.

Jules: I guess that if that's the only function, you become a member, you hang out.

Nathan: You sit on a machine that everybody else wants to use and you talk for forty five minutes.

Jules: Ah, I see.

Nathan: And then...

Jules: You have some peeves about the gym do you?

Nathan: Yeah, and then I'll go up to the guy or the girl who's sitting and just chatting and I say do you mind if I use this machine and then they start using it. I'm like arrrr.

Jules: Machine hogs?

Nathan: Yeah. But the thing is you have to, you want to keep your muscles warm so you want to go in a kind of a set routine and if you skip, say you start off with your lower legs and you work up through your body, for example, you want to keep like the next set of muscles around it warm but you can't do that if the machines or the weights you want to use are hogged.

Jules: You have to sit around and wait?

Nathan: Yeah and then you have to miss that out so that kind of drives me nuts.

Jules: I don't really understand machines. I've never really used a gym machine before.

Nathan: No?

Jules: No. If I go to a gym, I go to the studio and done some kind of workout.

Nathan: Yeah.

Jules: I like classes. I like classes to music where you can jump around and dance in front of a mirror.

Nathan: Yeah, aerobics?

Jules: Yeah, those kind of things, yeah.

Nathan: But you're like a yoga teacher so...

Jules: I'm a yoga teacher, yeah. Actually I've never done yoga in a gym. I know that a lot of gyms now offer yoga classes because yoga classes are really, really popular.

Nathan: Yeah.

Jules: And I guess it's a good partnership with muscle work and stuff if you want to stretch out.

Nathan: Great.

Jules: But for me, yoga is much more philosophical and much more about relaxation and meditation and far more about your inner world, and the gyms don't seem like the right environment for me to practice yoga.

Nathan: Right.