BroBible’s Worst Places on Earth: The Gym, Right After the New Year

If the answer is “no,” good job, bro. Keep living that beer, broads, and bratwurst lifestyle for as long as you can. Because that very question is rocketing through thousands of people’s minds tonight — and gets re-asked the following week to their shrinks. This anxiety-ridden realization is the chrysalis of what has become known as the “New Year’s Resolution,” that something you’re supposed to accomplish in the New Year, that you’ve never done before and is going to make you a better person.

You want our opinion, it’s a load of shit. New Year’s resolutions are just another excuse for Americans to be a bunch of fucking pussies. We don’t stick to things; that’s why we’re Americans. We didn’t like paying your taxes, England, so we threw a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor, had a revolution (it even sounds like “resolution,” right?), and went independent. Stuff like that.

One of the activities that folks are constantly choosing as a New Year’s resolution is going to the gym. They’re going to get healthy! Get in shape! Trim off the holiday pounds! Rock some six-pack abs! Go gluten-free! Become a vegan!

Well, fuck that. It’s a tiresome tradition that happens every year at every gym in America. All these newly energized people sign up for a gym membership and singlehandedly ruin it for all the people — like this writer and millions of other bros around the world — that have actually stuck to going to the gym for years.

First and foremost, these new gym types that sign up that first week of January are a bunch of fat, ugly wretches — so you can throw the whole “new crop of eye-candy” scenario out the window. These are the people whose idea of a workout in 2013 was getting up off the couch to get another beer or fatty soda out of the fridge. The range of motion between their mouth and the Doritos Locos taco they were consuming was what they called a “curl.” So the gym just gets unimaginably more busy with the dregs of humanity, who need to ask how to use machines and want spots every five minutes.

Second, the sheer amount of these new cretins at your gym makes it practically impossible for you to get your own workout done. They’re like ants all over a rotten piece of bread — covering all the ellipticals, treadmills, bench-presses, and floor mats. And since they have no idea what “gym etiquette” is, they leave these bowling-ball-sized sweat stains on everything from where their big, fat heads were. It just makes you angry. All you can hear in your head is “Hulk smash!”

Third, if you’re like us, you don’t want anybody talking to you at the gym; you just want to go through your routine, sweat your sweat, and get the fuck out of there. These new ingrates are talkative, because they need someone (besides their shrink) to verbally walk them through the process of changing their life. We’ve got one thing to say to those people: “Shut the fuck up!” We don’t want to hear about your honor student, your wife’s new puppy, or how hard you work at your blue-collar job. We just want to strap ourselves into a time machine and rocket off to when you weren’t around to tell us things we didn’t want to know.

There is one good thing that comes out of all of this: the foreknowledge that these nobodys will be gone in about a month. They’ll realize that they don’t have the time or energy to continue going to the gym — because really, they’re just a bunch of fat, ugly sacks of rats (which you knew already). Around February or March, you’ll be back to your normal routine, kicking ass by yourself with those other 10-12 bros that have been beaten and battered through New Year’s resolution time just like you have. The pop music will be playing over the loudspeaker again, the light in the corner will flicker happily, and the only thing you’ll hear besides Miley swinging naked on her wrecking ball is the sweet sound of silence.