Not Just a Man's World

A couple of days before I went on holiday I had to stay in a hotel for a night.  It’s the first time I’d stayed away on a workout night that I couldn’t flex to another day (because of the holiday).

Equipment available

Like most hotel gyms, this one was aimed at the cardio-lover with plenty of elliptical trainers, bikes, treadmills and step machines.  There was only a courtesy nod to those who do weights with a couple of machines (leg press and seated overhead press) a pull up station, two benches and a selection of dumbbells up to about 30kg (missing several weights towards the top end).

Fortunately my workout was mostly dumbbell-based so I didn’t need to adapt it.  Having said that, I did have to find a novel way to hold a pair of dumbbells in place for weighted glute bridges.

A footwear confession

Hotel (and most commercial) gyms require you to wear something on your feet.  Normally, training in my garage, I workout in bare feet.  After trying to do my one-leg deadlifts in trainers I got cross.  No way was I going to do max effort split squats in trainers and risk a knee injury. 

So I threw caution to the wind, kicked off the shoes and spent the rest of my workout in my socks waiting for someone to throw me out.

Other people in the gym

The other characters in the gym were fascinating.  To be fair, I think they found me interesting too.  I was one of only 3 women there and I was the only one in the weights section.  They certainly interacted differently than they would with another man.

The Boss and his posse

On first arriving, there was a bunch of kids in the weights area.  The posse were following the every lead and instruction of their leader, which would have been fine if he knew what he was doing. 

One of them was standing by the dumbbell rack chatting.  An excellent workout!  His mate sat up on a bench waving 10kg dumbbells about in between chatting.  I’ve no idea what the exercise was.

Meanwhile The Boss was doing a sort of incline bench press with the final member of his posse.  They were using 16kg and 14kg dumbbells respectively.

When they’d finished their arm “workouts” the posse watched in awe as their great leader did a set of “pull ups” with a 6 inch range of motion.  I was sorely tempted to show them what a real pull up looked like when he’d finished.

The cardio gossips

These two women had bottoms so large I was surprised they got through the door. 

They started on the exercise bikes, with personalised built-in TV screens, spinning slowly, not breaking a sweat, chatting and watching their favourite TV programmes.  They then moved to the elliptical trainers, taking a gentle jogging pace and continuing to gossip.

Their ability to multi-task left me in awe.

I found them later in the changing room agreeing to have coffee and cake on the way out.  I’m pleased they went to the effort of coming to the gym at all, but I’m amazed they had enough to talk about and astounded that they thought their gentle efforts burnt more calories than the cake they were planning to put in.

The try-hard guys

Mr Try-hard #1 liked machines and avoided dumbbells.  But he’d learned about rest periods.  He did a few reps and then waited for a bit before doing the next set. 

So I was puzzled by his lack of watch.  In fact, with no clock in the gym I was surprised that mine was the only watch I saw during my whole gym session.

Mr Try-hard #2 was doing dumbbell bench presses. 

It wasn’t a big weight (12kg in each hand) and his skeletal figure suggested he was a newbie to weights.  But his shoulders were round his ears and his back was flat as a board. 

This was upsetting.  When someone is early on in their training it’s the perfect time to master good form.  Curse whoever told him to start benching but failed to teach him how.  He’d clearly not been told the most basic technique of locking his shoulders back and pushing through his feet. 

The ogler

One of the posse hung back to sit on a bench pretending to do curls.  What he was actually doing was watching me.

I was doing my max effort split squats at the time. He sat in my line of vision, gawping with his mouth slightly open.  Every time I stopped for my rest period and looked directly at him he would swiftly look away and do a couple of curl reps.

The pick-up guy

A step up from the ogler was the guy who kept smiling at me.  I innocently thought it was a friendly smile – co-worker in the weights section of the gym.  Then he moved to small talk – pleasant enough in between each of my exercises (though I wouldn’t talk between sets).  Then he said it would be nice to have a drink with me after dinner…

Er… no thanks. 

I’m about 10 years his junior and I’m feeling good about myself, having found I look pleasingly ripped at the end of my cutting cycle (there are no mirrors in my home gym, so I’d not seen myself in my cropped gym top before). 

He wasn’t obese, but definitely wasn’t trim.  And in all the time I’ve been in the gym with him I’ve seen him do two sets of overhead presses on the machine and a few sets of leg presses. 

If you are going to ask a girl out for a drink when you meet her in the weights section of the gym, you at least need to work harder than her to impress her!

It’s hard being a woman

As you can see, there were some interesting characters around, some of which were extremely distracting when trying to workout.  Somehow being a woman in a hotel gym seems to attract an enormous amount of unnecessary attention.

Unless you like being the centre of attention and like improvising workouts with very limited basic equipment, working out in hotel gyms is probably a “necessity only” activity for a woman who isn’t a cardio addict.  But as an experience it does have to be tried at least once!

Related posts:

1. Diet to gain muscle as a woman
2. Women’s strengths
3. Lessons learned this week: layering up in the gym
4. Top ten benefits of having a home gym