“The gym” can mean many things. A place to de-stress, socialize, exercise, or be tortured. Take your pick. Sometimes it’s a combination of all of those. This year, it has taken on an additional meaning for me: a place to study.
Being in the department of rhetoric, I have an abundance of readings from all of my classes. Analyzing texts are a key feature of rhetoric, so as soon as I have completed one reading, I have to write a response to it; when that is finished, three more articles or books have piled up to read and analyze. It’s tricky to keep on top of it all.
Enter the gym. Temperatures in my city haven’t dropped yet, but they will soon, and it will become too cold to do much exercising outdoors. Exercise is a recession/student-friendly form of therapy and essential to my own philosophies of living healthy in the real world, so I have no intention of giving it up. Both studying and exercising can take up a good deal of time, however, which I do not exactly have. So for now, the gym is study-time.
Running on the treadmill isn’t an exciting prospect. If I’m on a treadmill, I like to crank up the incline—in my flat city, it’s a nice change of pace to walk up a steep incline. As long as I’m not speed-walking, I’m capable of reading at the same time as I walk. Between classes I can walk on an incline for 45 minutes and complete my reading for the next class all in one go.
Gaining confidence at the gym
The gym can be intimidating if you don’t regularly attend it. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and at one point or another, nearly everyone seems to have at least a passing thought of what if they’re all judging me; what if I embarrass myself? This is where “gym as study time” comes in very handy.
If you’re walking into the gym carrying your readings and a highlighter, you can be fairly confident that no one will be judging you for walking rather than running. They’ll probably just think you’re that much more hardcore if you’re going to the gym when you could have found a nice cozy seat somewhere to curl up and study in.
Last week I went to the gym with a friend and learned how to use a barbell for the first time. I had used dumbbells in the gym before but never a barbell. The other people at the gym all seemed to be using the barbells with relative ease (and by that I mean, they seemed to know what they were doing, not that their muscles weren’t straining). On the one hand, as a health writer, I suppose I could have felt uncomfortable that I didn’t actually know how to use a barbell, but instead I was having too much fun learning the technique and trying something completely different than normal.
The bottom line is, you don’t have to be afraid of the gym. There are probably a lot of people there who are equally new to the machines; everyone needs help and has to start somewhere. Besides that, gym attendees have to focus on their own exercise for safety reasons, so it’s unlikely that they are paying attention to anyone else in the room (if you’re going to try my trick of studying while walking on an incline, start off at a slightly slower pace than you’re used to. This will help you to determine the best speed and incline for you to go at while you’re reading/highlighting. Safety first!).