“Gymfluencers are a far greater problem.”

"The real reason Ancient Greeks exercised naked."

“There’s a lot of body dysmorphia going on in the gym. Most gym-goers are doing it for their health or because they enjoy it, but there are a lot of, especially younger, men who spend an ungodly amount of time in the gym because they hate how they look. It’s always been a thing, but social media has just been pouring petrol on the flames. 

Their feed is full of roided-up influencers benching six plates for breakfast, and they get the idea that those people are normal and not extreme statistical outliers. People forget that a very average-looking dude with love handles and a 135 bench is actually in much better shape than the vast majority of the population.”

"One of my friends who I play pickleball with has a wife who went from out of shape to in amazing shape, lifts all the time, always working out, etc., but she’s afraid to play pickleball with us because she doesn’t want to throw off her workout schedule/CICO.

It’s great to get in good shape, but when your entire life revolves around the gym, it’s no way to live, IMO.”

"Eventually, you learn to change the goal from trying to lift as heavily as possible to trying to lift as lightly as possible to still get a good stimulus. But usually, that lesson only comes after some real hardship. And when you have built up a really strong, capable body, a tough stretch of injuries can be very hard to recover from mentally.”

"Such a big part of gym culture is going into the place and wanting people to look at you for validation. I think that having physical insecurities helps a lot of people develop themselves, but there’s a point where it clearly becomes glorifying vanity. I mean, the amount of people just staring at themselves in the mirror for extended periods of time is not normal to me.

And I see a lot of this glorification of vanity as if exercising and staying in shape is some Spartan-warrior-level of honour, or some kind of heroic thing. I think your physical fitness should be an imperative regardless of anything, measured against yourself and your own strengths/weaknesses.”