All Type of Personalities – If you use a gym, you’re probably familiar with the personalities I’ll be talking about. They’re in every health club on planet earth. Seems they were all born from the same mother.
What are they, you might ask. Let me run them down for you.
Cardio-nuts: These are members who come in about twice a day and run for a couple of hours on the treadmill, then another hour on the step machine, and finish off with thirty minutes of recumbent bike. All of these exercises in one session, usually between six and nine in the morning. But that’s just the morning shift — they come back at night for an hour of spinning. Why all this cardio? Are they feeling guilty about something? A bit more of the cardio pump and they’ll fit in the tiniest crack in the wall! Being able to count every bone of your body by just looking yourself in the mirror is not quite the healthiest option.
Some suffer from anorexia or bulimia, and feel constantly guilty or fear of being overweight. They tend to adapt a proactive approach to their fear by working out so much. Try telling them that over-training has its drawbacks, and they answer you with the meanest look. Why bother? I just say, “looking good!” and go on my merry, finely-cut way.
Massive nuts: Now this one is common to all gyms. They hate cardio, and spend most of their hours pumping iron, working on building the most massive body. Most of them are loners; they pump iron, for several hours, then leave the gym. When you attempt to talk to them, they are very nice, a bit shy, but often with very interesting stories.
Social nuts: They are, as the name suggests, the social butterflies of the gym. Everyone knows them, whether they want to or not. They’re a lot like characters on Cheers. You got it: everybody knows their names. Most of their time is spent trying to meet new people, forgetting the reason they are truly supposed to be at the gym, which is, I sometimes have to remind people, working out. For social nuts, a good pump is the cell-phone number of a beautiful gym member, female, in most cases.
Narcissist nuts: You find them everywhere, including out of the gym. They always need to look beautiful for the mirror. And They pump one specific muscle in the body and then have to pose and ask the mirror, “Who’s the fairest one of all.” They flex their muscles a couple of times then return to working out. Though mostly men, women do it as well. Oh, yes. They work out, feel a little bit of sweat falling from their forehead, then it’s off to the locker room to put on more make-up and dry their hair. After each set, they go back to the locker room and do it all over again. That’s their ritual. It’s fun to watch!
Want-to-impress nuts: This is a quite interesting personality –very suicidal. They want to impress their peers by the amount of weight they can press or bench. Most of the time, they’re new to the sport and want to lift more than they can handle to obtain respect. Awful form, but you can’t tell them anything. A want-to-impress nut will put up several hundred pounds on the bench press. Results? Backaches, muscle pull, maybe even a trip to the E.R.
Ego-nuts: Not quite the same as narcissist-nuts. This one is often quite interesting, but quite annoying sometimes. Anyone seen Pumping Iron with, well, the governor of Califohhhhhnia? Yep! The famous Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can quite understanding why Arnold assumed this personality. Hell, he had the body to show for. Impossible to find as perfect a body as his these days. Well, you can find the same egocentric type in any gym today. They talk about themselves constantly, the new inch that popped up off the bicep, last weekend’s conquest, etc. They can go on and on and on – and usually do. Before you know it, your work-out is spent pumping bullshit from your ears. If you have time to burn, they can be quite amusing. However, a couple of hours spent with an ego-nut, and you might just jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There are many more personal-e-tease that you will encounter at the gym. Some have nicknames. Yep! They deserve them. Between personal trainers, you will hear the craziest names. I sometimes burst out laughing at some of them.
A friend in the business has earned the nickname “Three-head Gibson.” Why three heads? Well, reading a biological book, you will notice that all human beings have heads (in most cases), of course. But some have dedicated their lives to building what we call the trapezius, a muscle located in each side of the head, close to the neck, which, when they are really pumped, tend to stick up very prominently. In my friend’s case, they are so huge that they look like twin heads on each side of the one he was born with.
Another noteworthy nickname is “Eclipse.” This guy had such huge latissimus dorsi (“lats,” in the trade) that when he spread his wings, he blocked out the sun, like a mythological beast of some sort! Other nicknames are given to those who do deserve them. The nicknames are not similar to the personal-e-tease, however, they can be based on them.