For most people, the most common #gymfail is merely the failure to turn up in the first place. For a precious few, however, it might be the sexually suggestive way they are misusing the rowing machine. Or how they’re lifted clean off the ground by putting 980kg on to the lats machine. Or that inevitable comedy staple, the pull-up bar malfunction.
These mishaps and petty vanities form grist to the mill of the #gymfails subgenre, in which strange, unseen humans with phones take videos of calamitous gym accidents. On Instagram, IG Gym Fails boasts 1 million followers. IG Gym Fails and its many competitors do a lively business in pushing the flip-side to Instagram’s body-beautiful culture. They are joined by a YouTube community where gym-fails compilations can easily hit millions of views.
In endless clips, endless Lycra bros embarrass themselves through grunting then falling over. If schadenfreude were a steroid, viewers would have balloon animal muscles. Clearly, there’s something inherently delicious in watching a rippling tube of lats and pecs unexpectedly keel over as he goes into the squat.
Plenty of clips involve gym-goers using equipment in misdirected ways. Guys with their heads rested on the shinpad of an apparatus, nodding pointlessly. People throwing loaded barbells to each other. People using the machines upside down.
Some sit at the outer limits of comedy pratfalls – when an attempt at a bench press ends with the bar plus 100kg dropping on to your neck, you haven’t just failed at gym, you have failed at retaining a working windpipe.
The thrill of the genre is suspense as much as pathos. Sometimes you can see calamity coming. But sometimes the guy wobbling at the triceps machine is only the pin being pulled in a multi-part Rube Goldberg of physiotherapy bills.
It all points to our conflicted relationship with the gym – an overcrowded room full of clanking steel and Black Eyed Peas hi-NRG remixes that, in its cliquishness and competitiveness, is the closest most of us get to going back to school. As the gym-fails genre points out, it’s also the place where the bare facts of human vanity rub up against basic human stupidity, and expose the dull depths of human vanity. We’re all apes on a rock, it reminds us, and pride comes before a fall.
It scratches some primal itch to assure ourselves that our stronger and fitter genetic rivals can be undone. It’s the Darwin awards made flesh, proof that the most-fit are actually the least-fit. Sure, these people could jam us into their lockers if they wanted to. But no number of bulging muscles can make up for a poor grasp of Newtonian physics.
