BIGGER, STRONGER… SMARTER. I Read Books at the Gym and It’s Awesome
You remember this guy who is doing each of the exercises wrong? Or the girl that comes to gym from time to time just to WALK on the treadmill? Well — for some people, I’m still the weirdest guy at the gym.
To be honest, I’m not surprised by that. Every day, I see myself a number of guys doing each of their deadlifts and squats wrong. And yeah — there is plenty of girls walking for an hour on the treadmill, too. But I’ve never seen anyone who would do the same thing as me at the gym. I’m this guy who is reading a book during a workout.
My gym’s “starter pack” consists of five things: towel, notebook (where I write down all my progress), pen (to write down this progress), bottle of water and — finally — an Amazon Kindle. During a break after nearly every set of any exercise, I first smash my face with towel, write down how did the last set go, drink a bit, and start reading another book or magazine. I’m using now a special gym plan that makes me wait around 3 minutes between sets. It means that after each set I have around 2 minutes to understand how the world works, get into space with my fav sci-fi character or imagine I’m slashing some wild beasts while reading a fantasy novel.
It sounds weird when you think about it for the first time. Probably because of one simple reason — you’ve just never seen anyone doing this at the gym. Yeah, I do get some weird looks sometimes from other sweaty guys. Once one of them asked me — pointing at Kindle — why I have such a big phone. Another time, however, I had a short discussion with one other guy.
— That’s Kindle? — he asked.
— Well, yeah.
— So you readin’ books here? At the gym?
— Well, yeah. You know, sometimes reading something for my classes, sometimes just for fun.
He stopped for a couple of seconds and finally ended up saying:
— Well, it’s actually not that stupid.
And, indeed, it is not stupid at all.
So when YOU should consider bringing a book (or tons of them on your e-book reader) to gym?
When you don’t have time to read books at home
Adult life’s not easy. You can’t just get nerdy all the time and stick with staying 24/7 in your room, reading a book after book. Lots of us, adults, literally don’t have free time to get into this new bestseller that has been published just a week before. We go back from work in the evening and are too tired to read even a few pages of a book. We end up on the internet or on the sofa, watching a TV.
Every time at the gym I manage to read a book for 20–30 minutes. It’s not a lot, but you can finish some books doing like this in a week or two. That’s still something.
When you think of gym as “boring stuff”
I know myself a couple of guys who don’t want to go to gym just because they consider it boring. And I’m not blaming them for this. In fact, I can kind of agree with them. Considering the fact that at the gym people are spending more time resting than actually working out, this may seem to be boring. Especially if you have a plan that encourages you to take a 2 to 4 minutes breaks between sets.
What you should do in a case like this? Look at sweaty people around you? Listen to some angry music, repeating in your mind: YEAH, I’M GONNA MAKE THIS 5 POUNDS MORE ON THE NEXT SET! Yeah, this sounds boring.
So why not reading a book instead?
When you don’t mind people looking at you
Yes, it happens. Not that often, however, and not always they look at you because you’re reading something on Kindle. In fact, people at the gym are looking at others all the time.
Why? Because of couple of things. You know what’s one of them? Well — they do it, because they have nothing else to do. You can be one of them or, instead…
Exactly — grab your Kindle.
