Can women *not* STFU, actually?

I'm loud in the gym and you should be, too.

iStock | Jacob Wackerhausen

Body Type is about body culture — how people think, talk, and act about bodies nowadays. Check out some of my most popular posts. Please subscribe for free if you like them. To read everything, upgrade to a paid subscription for less than $1/week. I’m also writing a book coming out next year, more on that here! Thanks for reading.

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New York Magazine

recently published a ragebaity post titled “All Men Are Exercising Wrong” that included some real whoppers from readers who have Big Feelings about gym etiquette:

PLEASE NO MORE MEN IN COREPOWER CLASSES!!!! Either stay home or go flip a tire or something. - Bella

That’s not so much about gym etiquette as it is about maintaining an imagined status quo in which women be yogaing and men be doing whatever idiot shit with car parts, but OK, Bella, sure.¹

There was also:

More of a comment than anything else: Can men STFU? Both at the gym and in exercise classes, men of all ages are eager to make their presence known by groaning, moaning, huffing and puffing loud enough for the entire room to hear. It is so unpleasant and obnoxious. The women in my spin studio are worn out after class — and dead quiet throughout. But the men are loud and distracting as hell the entire time. Enough already!! — Put a sock in it

I posted a note in response to this:

So I’m a woman who lifts weights (“WHAT the actual FUCK???” - Bella), I once trained for and competed in a powerlifting meet², and I worked for about six years as a fitness instructor teaching weekly indoor cycling classes. Put a sock in it effectively summoned me with a bat signal to comment on her sizzling little take, so I’m gonna elaborate here. But first, storytime!

When I was teaching cycling, I had a couple of regulars, all men, who were indeed kind of distracting to me, but not because of noise. One guy, I am ever so serious, brought a full broadsheet print newspaper³ into class and peacefully paged through it while gently pedaling on the bike and ignoring my cues. I found myself conflicted:

Another, who sat in the front row and always asked me to “Pump the volume up!”⁴ came to class in full Lance Armstrong cycling regalia, which, fine, a cute fit is a workout assist, I get it. But at points, after unzipping the top of his garment by a couple of inches (? bro), he’d put his hand into a finger-gun shape and, well, fire at his reflection in the mirror right before taking off into a sprint. The Shooter McGavin of indoor cycling, right there in my class 🤩

Another guy cycled so hard that by the final third of class he was literally drooling all over his bike, just letting rivers of saliva and sweat pour out from his head onto the handlebars due to his exertion. He was always otherwise OK and in good spirits, never failed to thoroughly wipe down his entire bike afterward, and brought me homemade ice cream sometimes, so whatever, he’s good in my book.

Point being, if we want to have a conversation about what sort of person tends to be⁵ more distracting in some way in a fitness context — in both innocent and offensive ways — well, after a decade-plus of working out and being employed in gyms, I don’t have stories like this about women. You know what, though? In one particular way, I wish I did.

Despite the varying implications of these dudes’ behavior, it all stems from the same thing: They feel incredibly comfortable in the gym. Too comfortable, you might argue, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But to bring it back to the “Can men STFU?” demand, a lot of men don’t STFU because they don’t think they have to, because they’re comfortable doing whatever they need to do to feel they’re getting a good workout. In certain instances, they’re quite right to do so, and women would be right to do so, too.

As I wrote in my note, being noisy during your workout — grunting, huffing, puffing; I don’t believe Put a sock in it when she says men are regularly moaning during workouts, but maybe my gym just isn’t a horny place :( — can be helpful. There are a few reasons why:

Most benefits have less to do with the actual sound and more with the way we breathe just beforehand … some of our power may come from something called the Valsalva maneuver, in which you put pressure on your lungs but close your throat. “We do it to produce force. We have to air-trap like that to lift, to push,” Dr. Sandage said. — New York Times

A Drexel University study found that grunting instead of regular breathing can boost maximum static handgrip strength by as much as 25 percent. What’s more, it improves your stability by forcing your core to contract, says strength coach Tony Gentilcore, C.S.C.S. And the more stable your core or foundation, the stronger you are. — Men’s Health

“…one of our hypotheses is that yelling may activate the autonomic nervous system, which is the nervous system that controls the fight or flight response — that feeling you get when you become startled or scared, that adrenaline rush that a lot of people speak of. And that may help the muscle contractions be more complete and more forceful.” — WHYY

Now listen, I get it: if some guy in the gym is shrieking like a nutcase on every rep for 30 minutes straight, he’s in need of a forceful “Sir, we live in a society” call-in. There’s probably a bit of dick-swinging, flex on ‘em energy to his noisiness as well, which is what I suspect some people dislike more than anything. But you know what helped me, a woman — “Even though you lift WEIGHTS???” - Bella — feel more comfortable in the gym over the years? Bringing my own dick-swinging aura to the proceedings because I’m allowed to be in the goddamn gym, too, and no one’s going to make me feel weird about doing a loud exhale at the top of my 2x body weight deadlift.

What I find so annoying about the STFU, MEN thing in this particular context is that it evinces an attitude that’s more corrosive to our culture than anyone cares to admit: people can’t stand to be the least bit bothered by anything, ever. If you encounter some human noise in the gym, it’s fine if you find it irritating for half a second, but, and I say this with due tenderness in the spirit of human progress and cultural harmony … get over it.

Really, what’s it hurting? Probably nothing, like Shooter’s finger guns weren’t, even though I had to bite my knuckles and focus on a point in the middle distance to keep from laughing every time. The newspaper guy was more out of line and distracting to others, which is why I shut that down (bringing about the collapse of print journalism, surely). I knew the difference between Too Distracting and Fine, Probably, and you do, too. Stop acting like some justifiable exercise noise every now and then is as if all the men in the weight room started doing the haka in the middle of your set. (That would be sick in my opinion, but different strokes.)

Do you really think other people should entirely shut the fuck up, stop going to the same classes as you, or stay home just because you were irritated for half a second? Come, now. You are not within your rights to demand that of anyone and guess what, babe — no one is within their rights to demand that of you. This should delight you!

Gina Clementi, Goodstory

, responded to my note with this:

Why don’t we normalize women huffing and puffing? I feel like so many of us have been conditioned to stay quiet, composed, and contained. Fearful of being judged. Maybe part of the shift isn’t just asking men to tone it down, but giving women full permission to stop giving a shit, breathe loudly, and be unapologetically present in their effort too.

Indeed! Put a sock in it seems to value a spin class environment akin to an Amtrak Quiet Car, but as an instructor I’d much rather hear the kinds of things I heard when the people in my class felt comfortable in it, hopefully because I cultivated such a vibe: huffs, puffs, “woo!”-s, grunts while going up steep hills, claps, cheers, “come on!”-s, and so forth. Seriously, this lends a contagious energy to the space, and if you’re interested in serious strength training you might find that a grunt from the other end of the weights floor can do the same. You won’t be as bothered when you realize for yourself the value of it, or at least understand why people do it. I want to help you feel less bothered in the gym. I’m on your side, here.

Nothing made me feel more comfortable in any male-dominated environment I’ve stepped into since than making myself comfortable in the gym first. That doesn’t mean I act like a dick, get in other people’s way, or cause a prolonged, ridiculous scene, but it does mean that I do that thing that women are always telling each other to do lately (for good reason): Take up space.

This is hollow social media pablum until you do it. It’s difficult and it takes practice. The gym is a good place to start, and in my experience it’s surprisingly easier to do it there than in work meetings or classrooms. All you have to do, really, is breathe.

1. I’m compelled to mention that my yoked husband is the one who went on a yoga retreat in Mexico a few years ago and I’m the one who suggested we visit the tire-flipping station at the cool outdoor gym we went to during our honeymoon, but anyway.

2. That’s where you lift as heavy as you can in the back squat, deadlift, and bench press. You are awarded points/placements based on how heavy you lift relative to your body weight; if a 130 pound woman deadlifts 300 pounds, she gets more points than a 160 pound woman doing it, etc.

3. WaPo, natch.

4. And then someone else would tell me it was too loud … the people could never be satisfied, I tell you …

5. I said tends, not is always, before the most odious men on Substack dot com come for me. If you are offended by this claim it’s because you’re one of the worst. Don’t prove me right by haunting the hallways of my comments section.