Devlin Brown at the watercooler: The 10 commandments for gym members

I finally did it and got a gym contract so that I can add strength training to my fitness regimen. It is terribly overwhelming; is there a guide on how to act in a public gym?

The Water Cooler would like to congratulate you for taking the first step towards not becoming a gym meme. Yes, we know, gyms are, for the most part, inclusive places, but as every reader will know: someone is always recording.

I have never liked the “gym fails” or “fail nation” videos and memes. While they may be humorous in a commedia dell’arte slapstick kind of way, they are also terribly sad. They reinforce exactly what people fear: if you do something incorrectly, you will be mocked.

And in a world created by millennials and perfected by Gen Z, this mocking goes beyond in-person stares and giggles. The whole world sees it. It becomes viral. The Silicon Valley types who coined the term “viral” surely didn’t intend the double entendre of defining a popular social media post as a virus eating away at, and possibly killing, our societal health?

Try this now. Open WhatsApp on your phone and open a chat with anyone. Press the little smiley face that denotes emojis and then click on GIF. In the search bar, type “gym fails”. Take your pick of “hilarious”, viral, gym-fail moments that became memes and GIFs.

I had an Irish great-uncle. That sounds like the opening line to a joke, but it’s true. He left this earth before his beloved national rugby team went from perennial underachievers to the best in the world underachievers. I digress: he told me that South Africans needed to learn to laugh at themselves more. This from an old Catholic man who was born in the immediate aftermath of the violence that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty.

To be fair, we have learnt to do just that in SA. Our state’s unceremonious waddle towards the brink of failure is so not funny that it is funny. If we can laugh at gym failures that probably hurt like hell, why can’t we, and the rest of the world, laugh at our governance failures that hurt like hell?

Yet, it’s all avoidable. A new dawn doesn’t have to be as mythical as bullet trains in smart cities, it can be achieved with a paint-by-number approach to the basic fundamentals of genuine political will, good governance, accountability and actual action.

Your success in a public gym can be achieved just as easily. I was lucky to be invited as a guest into a public gym just last week and was reminded how annoying they can be, but how wonderful they are. Here are the 10 gym commandments:

• Always take a sweat towel to the gym;
• Use said sweat towel to leave the piece of equipment in the condition you found it;
• Always return weights to the rack; only idiots leave them lying around;
• Don’t hog more pieces of equipment than you need;
• Plan your workouts so you don’t loiter around looking like someone’s creepy step-uncle;
• If someone is using what you want to use, ask them to let you know when they’re done, and then do something else — don’t stand there burning holes in the back of their head with your eyes while waiting, because that’s irritating;
• If you need to skip, run on the spot or swing kettlebells, do it where there is enough space to do so — don’t be that person risking everyone else’s life and limb;
• Learn how to use proper form and use an appropriate weight for your strength level. Fitness consultants will gladly assist and there are a plethora of online resources;
• If you need to use the restroom or fetch more water — as long as you don’t exercise in Randburg because then it is a lottery — leave your sweat towel over the piece of equipment to denote that it is being used; and
• Don’t pollute the air with loud in-person or cellphone conversations, and don’t hog equipment while texting or chatting instead of training.

Follow those 10 rules and you’ll fit in wherever you go. Most importantly, you’ll radically reduce your chances of becoming a gym meme, becoming too irritated to train, or hurting yourself or someone else.