By Amanda Winton
You’re walking through the shops trying to grab a last-minute Secret Santa gift when you begin to hear bells accompanied by the lyrics of “I-I-I-I don’t want a lot for Christmas…”. Christmas music in November should be illegal! A Mariah Carey-filled reminder that not only Christmas but summer is coming. (Don’t sue me George R.R. Martin)
Hot girl/boy summer is around the corner, but you’ve been using the stress of Uni (despite your last exam being a month ago) as a valid reason to raid the pantry. And given that the social calendar is a weekly (verging on daily) Christmas alcohol-filled party Fest, it’s unlikely a crash diet can get you out of this one.
It’s time to go to the gym.
You don’t pay $9.92 a week for nothing. Although the current physical results wouldn’t agree.
You find the pair of sneakers your parents bought you in high school, basically brand spanking new. Despite investing in a small fortune of revealing activewear, it’s a big T-shirt and leggings fit after a successful yet not deliberate bulking season.
You pull into the car park at 7 pm, expecting it to be empty. Instead, you find yourself squeezing in between two P plater cars, 100m away from the entrance. You press ‘outdoor walk’ on your Apple Watch because you’re not here to play games and walk to the front doors.
The main character energy you had built up whilst listening to ‘Work Hard Play’ by AKON, dissipates when it appears the other members of the gym did not take the entire winter off like you had.
Awkwardly walking past what only called be described as a herd of pubescent high school boys crowded around the one piece of gym equipment, you choose the treadmill, a seemingly safe option.
Level 3 on the treadmill, best to start with 0 incline. You feel the inner cardio god within you come out, the sweat starts to rise to the surface and your lungs are pushed to their very limit.
The timer reads 1 minute 37 seconds.
Just as you are about to get off, some absolute eye candy hops onto the treadmill next to you. Absolute DILF. To your shock, he manages to jump into a jog at level 7, incline 3 and after 5 minutes he’s not even breaking a sweat. Feeling defeated, it’s time instead to grab some dumbbells and find a suitable random workout via TikTok. After some scrolling, you find an influencer who has the same perfect derriere that you’re striving towards and begin to search. After digging through several #ads of an overly smiley woman on gym equipment you find a video that looks at least semi-understandable.
Starting this workout would have been made much more efficient had not every single pair of dumbbells been separated already. Working out with two different dumbbells would just further exacerbate the effect your nightly late workouts had on your arms.
After a 15-minute workout that has rendered your arms into jelly, it’s time to begin legs. You notice the girl next to you in her bum scrunch leggings doing her squats and wonder, ‘Is it the exercise she’s doing, or is it the bum scrunch leggings doing the lord’s work?’. Whilst you ponder this thought you stare intently until you look up and make direct eye contact with the bum’s owner who is probably wondering how much of a creep you are.
It’s at this point that you decide to call it on today’s gym sesh. After all, all bodies are summer bodies.