Going gangbusters at the gym

On Friday night, as I have mentioned, I sprinted up a hill. Since I was feeling somewhat sadistic, I decided to follow my sprints with a little session on the weights, to really give me that feeling of having actually worked during the week. When I walked into the gym I found myself confronted with a bevy of somewhat suspicious-looking and very large Japanese bodybuilders. These chaps sniggered suitably when I asked them a question about the weight of one of the bars, but they relaxed a little when I started doing decent weights. Their initial amusement aside, these men were helpful and friendly. One was particularly helpful, and here I was reminded of an interesting fact about Japanese - if you can read Japanese you can get the general gist of Chinese. I was wearing my kickboxing singlet to the gym, and all these big boys could tell it was something to do with martial arts from its Chinese characters. The particularly helpful man turned out to be a practitioner of karate with 40 years` experience, and he proceeded (in between spotting me on the bench) to try and prove that his martial art was better than mine. This is hard enough to do in English, since:

1. I couldn`t give a shit, I do it because it`s fun and not in order to kill anyone
2. kickboxing is pretty cool

Sadly, this man didn`t speak English and I don`t speak japanese, so the natural consequence of our linguistic compatibility was that I found myself going through a variety of demonstrations of different techniques (including testing the hardness of shins and knuckles, defences against knees, and various forms of open-hand attack about which I care precisely nothing) in the middle of the gym. While the big body-builders went about their business around us.

The moral of the lesson, dear reader, is that while there are many cultural differences between Asia and the West, the existence of the Martial Arts Wanker is a universal bond holding our different societies together. On the way home my experiences with this chap gave me cause to think about some other things I have seen at gyms in Japan. I shall therefore present you with a list, a la the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, of Causes for Consternation in Exercise:

1. Gang Members at a gym: I am mildly suspicious that Friday night at the gym is Tottori fascist gang members` night. Something about those big chaps made me suspicious that they might be related to the supposed fascist gangs which supposedly exist in Tottori. Probably they were just big blokes, though.
2. Weird shoe rules: all gyms have weird rules about the shoes you can wear in the gym. You can`t run to the gym, for example, because then your shoes would go from outside to inside. Sometimes you can`t wear your shoes in some sections of the gym. This makes life rather unnecessarily complicated.
3. The bumless woman: there always seems to be a woman in the gym who has no bum. That`s right, no bum. On Wednesday there was a bumless woman who was walking at a zombie pace on the treadmill, which is dumb for 4 reasons: 1) she was so thin she didn`t need to do any exercise, but really should just go home and eat some puppy fat, 2) she had no bum, so how could she walk? 3) she had probably walked to the gym faster than her shuffle on the treadmill and 4) she probably walks more in a day than most people in the west do in a week - so why bother going to the gym just to walk more, slower? On Friday the resident bumless woman (a different one) was doing pointless chin ups in which she wobbled her whole body as much as possible in order to make the chin up as little effort as possible. The bumless woman is often doing a pointless exercise, especially
4. Pointless aerobics: a lot of Japanese aerobics seems to consist of standing still, or lying down, doing nothing. Aerobics which doesn`t even make your cheeks flush is not exercise. As well play cricket, in my opinion.
5. The deceptively strong man: Japanese men may wear make-up, wigs and velvet, but they are stronger than they look. Usually there is a man in the gym who looks tiny and thin, and is lifting a car in each hand. How they pack the muscle in so deceptively continually surprises me - like when the stir fry chef pulls up his sleeve and you see he has taken the sinew from 3 men and stuffed it into his arm, but you thought he was a skinny little man with pimples
6. The strangely-sized machinery: because everyone in Japan is small, the squat rack is too short at its tallest part for me to get under without squatting. In Australia, I have to lift the bar down from the rack and fiddle with things in order to use it. Here I just chuck the bar on top and crawl under it on my hands and knees. But the best thing is the bench press, which is designed to be impossible for one person to use. The pillars for the bar are so close together they brush your ears, and you have to put the weights on both ends of the bar at once or it upends and hits you in the face. Once you start bench pressing you find yourself lying on a knife edge (like Bruce Dickinson in that Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young), because the bench is so narrow. Even the smallest difference in strength between chest muscles, or the slightest error in placement of your hands, and you tip onto the floor with 60kgs on top of you.
7. The end of the weights: who reading this has ever put their little peg into the stack of weights on one of the machines and found themselves near the bottom? In Australia, my weights are only ever a quarter to a third of the stack. But here I am only 3 notches away from lifting the whole weight stack when I do seated rows. Merely by sitting in a plane for 9 hours I have become massive.
8. The 80s machinery: somewhere in every gym will be a piece of equipment so archaic and bizarre-looking one can only assume it was bought off the set of The Exorcist. In Miss Ember`s gym in Hiroshima there is a type of bed one lies on which has separate rests for each leg. Lying in a V-shape on this bed, one turns on a machine which swirls ones hips and legs about. Now that`s what I call exercise!!!!! Bugger sprints, I`m gonna lie down on the swirly-bed and become HUGE.

There is also, of course, the obligatory vending machine and a variety of machinery for taking your pulse, weight and height. Going to the gym to do pointless exercise at a zombific pace which cannot do anything to you because you have no bum has been reduced to a science in this country. Having said that, however, my gym costs me 200 yen for as long as I want, so I can`t complain too much. And the walk to and from is probably worth that 200 yen in any case ...