Photograph courtesy of Mitchell Johnson.
July 14, 2024
I went to the neighborhood gym for the first time today. Until now I was driving, sporadically, to the university gym where I get in for free, but only sporadically. So I paid forty-five dollars for a month of entry to this one. I’m trying to get stronger. Bigger, too. It sounds boring because it is. I am a twenty-seven-year-old gay man who has started going to the gym. I have all the standard gym desires: strength, size, beauty, health. The trouble is that these are poorly defined, with few benchmarks. So I have come up with a more specific goal, too: I would like to do a pull-up. Overhand, unassisted. Right now I can kind of do one if I start with a little jump, but when I try a true pull-up, the best I can do is retract my shoulders and bend my elbows a little before my strength gives out.
The neighborhood gym is run by a Ukrainian family. The daughter, no older than fifteen, signed me up. It’s small and not very nice; the dingy locker room reminds me of my middle school’s. Mercifully, though, it’s uncrowded. Today I’m starting with assisted pull-ups on the assisted pull-up machine, which has a pad for your knees and a counterweight to help lift your body up. I tried it with forty pounds of assistance, then fifty, and then finally, at sixty, I could complete five. Then I did the rest of my workout, with various machines and weights and benches, and walked home.
July 16
I am mostly allergic to routine. An old roommate once noticed that each night, after brushing my teeth, I would leave the toothbrush in a different spot in the bathroom.
Three years ago I bought a pull-up bar from Target. I had the same goal then as now. When I installed the bar, I assumed I’d be able to do a few pull-ups right away. Not so. My failure surprised me. I thought pull-ups were a more achievable physical feat, like touching one’s toes. It seems intuitive that a body should be able to lift itself. Not so.
The pull-up bar still hangs in my kitchen doorway, taunting me. Every so often I make an attempt. It’s become one of several objects that remind me of aborted self-improvement projects: a notebook half filled with morning pages, a yoga mat gathering dust in my closet.
Today a friend came over to my house, saw the pull-up bar, and tried it. “It’s so hard!” she said, her legs flailing. “It hurts my insides.”
July 31
Went back to the gym after ten days out of town. On vacation in Oregon, with my family, I didn’t work out a single time. On the plane home, I watched an episode of Succession with Alexander Skarsgård in it and thought, I’d like to look like him. He probably works out even when he’s on vacation. But he’s rich, of course, and likely does other extreme things like steroids and blending chicken into smoothies. Still I would like to look more like Alexander Skarsgård than I currently do. I’m 6’3, almost his height, but far skinnier.
Today I felt weaker than before the trip, but maybe that was in my head. I set the assisted pull-up machine to sixty pounds and could complete only four before my arms gave out. I moved on, humbled, to the leg press.
I’ve googled “how to do a pull-up” a few times, which has inspired Instagram to start showing me Reels about it. One man with shoulders like cantaloupes explains proper technique. Arms no narrower than shoulder width, he says. You don’t want your body just dangling loosely in space. Tense your core, move your shoulder blades back and down. You want your body to behave as one singular unit.
He makes the motion look instinctual, fluid. He’s like a frog in a documentary jumping off a leaf in slow motion. For a moment, he is totally integrated. A vector of pure movement, unfettered from his own hulking body. He floats.
When I attempt it in the gym, I feel disjointed, my arms and shoulders and back each feebly trying to hoist me. My person hangs limp. Dead weight.
August 2
Another tip from Instagram: Instead of trying to pull yourself up toward the bar, imagine you’re bringing the bar down to you. Hold it in your hands and imagine breaking it overhead, like a stick. There are all kinds of tips in this vein. Pull-ups are a matter of both strength and technique, and it is hard to tell in what proportions. Videos like this are appealing because they make it seem intellectual, a problem that can be solved with better theory.
I tried envisioning breaking a stick in the gym today, per the influencer. I tried it unassisted, on the normal pull-up bar, because it seemed like this new mindset required total faith. The machine and its counterweights might interrupt the clarity of my vision. My hands white-knuckled around the bar. I moved my shoulder blades back. Stick, I thought. You are breaking a stick in your hands. I floundered in front of the girl at the front desk and a man sitting in a chair by the window. Face hot with shame.
August 5
Grip strength is a concern. Sometimes what falters is not the shoulder or back muscles but the tiny ones in your fingers. “The best way to start is by hanging,” my boyfriend, who can do a pull-up, texts me. If I can hang from the bar for thirty seconds, then I should try retracting my shoulder blades and activating my core and hanging in that more stressed position for thirty seconds.
I hang for thirty seconds. Then I retract for thirty seconds. My body starts shaking, but my grip lasts. Then I try to pull completely up, a Hail Mary I already know won’t work.
August 7
Machine still set to sixty pounds. Seven completed with great effort, then some dumbbells, cables, etc. “Arm day.”
When I ask him, my friend Colin tells me he can do ten pull-ups. He recently started going to the gym, too, more often than I do, but for the same gay reasons. We are both nearing thirty.
“Sometimes I get worried about symmetry,” Colin says, because his left arm is a little smaller and weaker than his right. Henry, his boyfriend, chimes in to say he thinks these concerns about bodily symmetry sound fascist.
August 9
Going to the gym is mostly a slog, drudgery in service of vanity. It is stultifying to lift objects surrounded by mirrored walls. In my earbuds a vapid podcast plays and beyond that, on the gym’s speakers, Pitbull. The only redeeming thing about the gym is that it’s erotic, which for me manages to redeem it almost entirely.
I ogle. Today there was a short, buff man doing cable rows and grunting, back arched with his ass pointing skyward in tight shorts. There was also a tall, curly-haired man on the bench press, who wore a sweatshirt for the first set and then stripped to a tank top once his arms were plump enough to show off. Fantasies of illicit sex in the locker room. I wondered if they saw me and what they thought. My physical appeal has always been more fey, twinkish—like a Renaissance apprentice, or a canvassing Mormon. I’m not sure it plays here.
I’ve been reading Edmund White’s 1980 book States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. In Los Angeles he visits a gay gym, with a row of Nautilus machines “as gleaming and forbidding as the blades of the Cuisinart.” They call it the assembly line. Gay men in LA, White writes, “have to be well built; they expect good mileage out of themselves and easy handling.” Nearly fifty years later and far beyond LA, in a tiny Ukrainian gym on the north side of Chicago, the desire remains the same. Reading White’s description, I feel implicated in a long, tiresome lineage.
August 11
I’ve been going to the gym about three times a week, and each time I do the assisted pull-up machine, I am stuck at sixty pounds. Sometimes I can lift myself at fifty, but then only once. A pull-up is binary; one can do it or one can’t. Until I’m on the other side, it feels like I’m making no progress.
Instagram Reels is full of men. They tell me that leg workouts increase testosterone, improving performance for the rest of the body. They tell me that releasing the weight is as important as lifting it, so I try to go down slowly. They tell me I should eat my body weight and then some in grams of protein, which I don’t count, and that I should take various supplements I’ll never buy. Many of them are gay. The ones who aren’t might as well be, so earnestly are they obsessed with the male body. Physically they are often attractive but just as often uncanny, all veins and bulging lumps. Steroid use seems rampant. Everyone talks about this, but still: The standards these men adhere to seem obviously unhealthy—not to mention ever inflating. I wonder when homosexuals will reach peak size.
August 15
Pull-up is an embarrassing word, and I don’t like to say it. Today I remembered a prior association I had with it: It’s the brand of diaper worn by toddlers after they graduate from their first diapers. I was made to wear them for years as a child because of my bed-wetting. So the word is classically overdetermined, evoking multiple humiliations, indexing my bodily failures.
I saw an acquaintance at the gym today, a guy who lives in my neighborhood. He’s huge, bursting out of his tank top. His arms are the size of legs. Straight, despite his mustache, and loves his girlfriend a lot. A scholar of Walter Benjamin and an anarchist. I wonder why he goes to the gym so much. I like to imagine he’s preparing for the revolution, but maybe it’s shallower, just for looks. Maybe his girlfriend loves it, and they have crazy sex.
September 3
Two weeks without a workout. I went to protests of the Democratic National Convention, then caught a brief illness, then had a multiday depressive episode in which I leaned further into many bad habits: smoking, long naps, watching more Reels. Optimized people loop on my screen, exalting various high-protein meals and cheery kettlebell hacks. Now it is after Labor Day and thus time to change everything. Starting now, I will lead a worthwhile life. A girl in my phone standing in a stark white kitchen tells me the new moon has the potential to bring me blessings, if I set my intentions now.
Trying to get serious. A vigorous attempt today on the kitchen bar brought me what I will generously call halfway up. Halfway up! Progress!
Later that day
I went to the gym and to my surprise was able to complete one pull-up on the machine at only forty pounds assistance.
September 6
This month, my boyfriend’s gym across town is celebrating its thirty-third anniversary with free guest passes every Friday, so I tag along. He thinks the owners are Christian and are making a big deal out of thirty-three because that’s how old Jesus was when he died. The front desk staff and much of the clientele do seem religious. It’s a huge facility next to a hospital, filled with old people rehabilitating and younger people at the weight racks and treadmills. Everyone trying for eternal life.
The place is much nicer than my gym, with various heated pools and saunas and stretching machines. He takes me to a pull-up bar and demonstrates a pull-up at my request. Then I try and fail. Use your core more, he says. Pull with your back, not your arms. I get a little higher. Breathe out on the way up. He describes a feeling of inner lift, emanating from my midsection, that is impossible for me to imagine.
Afterward, he says it’s likely harder for me because I’m tall, which restores my ego. We do some other exercises and go to the steam room.
September 8
Every day, new Reels, offering new pull-up programs. A Scandinavian woman with beefy, cabled arms, in a blue Lycra top and matching yoga pants, outlines one:
“If you can hang from the bar for thirty seconds, then you’re ready for scapular rows. And when you unlock ten scapular rows, then you’re ready for scapular pull-ups. And when you unlock ten scapular pull-ups, then you’re ready for Australian rows. And when you unlock ten Australian rows, then you’re ready for jackknife pull-ups. And when you unlock ten jackknife pull-ups, then you’re ready for jackknife top hold. And when you unlock a ten-second hold, then you’re ready for band-assisted pull-ups. And when you unlock five band-assisted pull-ups, you’re ready for band-assisted top hold. When you unlock a ten-second hold, you’re ready for negative pull-ups. And when you unlock five negative pull-ups, then you’re ready for your first pull-up.”
Another video, of a different woman in a chartreuse sports bra and black compression shorts, demonstrates a “viral floor pull-up hack” that involves lying face down on a towel and pulling herself around her apartment with her arms.
Watching these exhausts me. I confront the flimsiness of my own desire; I want it but not nearly that much.
September 10
At dinner with some friends, we discuss the most normatively gendered aspects of our personalities. Someone mentions her long-running interest in spinning wool; another his love of baseball. One woman says how much she likes having things carried for her. I mention the gym, my quest to do a pull-up. The guy who loves baseball, who is also the only other man at the dinner, says, “I want to do a pull-up, too!” It makes me wonder how many men can even do one, and after dinner I look it up and the answer is only 17 percent. There’s no data for the percentage of men who want to do a pull-up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s close to 100. Every man I’ve asked about pull-ups has had an opinion.
September 16
Reel of a gray-haired woman, sixty-five years old, taken over the course of five weeks as she attempts to lift her chin over the bar. By week five she is all the way up, beaming, accomplished.
I’ve been trying to do a pull-up, on and off, for nine weeks. On the bar in my kitchen, I can now pull myself, generously speaking, halfway up. Elbows bent at an almost right angle but no farther. From underneath the bar, I imagine my life above it. I imagine that hoisting myself up will feel like flying, like cumming, like winning a big award. In truth I know it will be satisfying but not entirely. Then I’ll want to get to two, then five, then ten.
If I had kept a more consistent routine, I would likely be more successful by now (a lament I have for any number of things). I tried to write a book this summer, too, and got only what might be generously called halfway. Every summer I set big goals, envision profound changes, and then the season slips away.
Mitchell Johnson is a writer who lives in Chicago.
