“
But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.
”
”
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
“
How many wives have told their husbands, “I’m fine,” when they really mean, “I want to cut your balls off with a butcher knife”? How many men have told their girlfriends, “You look fine,” when they really mean, “You need to go back to the gym and work out—a lot.” It’s the universal way of saying we’re just peachy—when we’re really anything but.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tangled (Tangled, #1))
“
You never want to look in a mirror," Lula said. "Men love mirrors. They look at themselves doing the deed and they see Rex the Wonder Horse. Women look at themselves and think they need to renew their membership at the gym.
”
”
Janet Evanovich (Seven Up (Stephanie Plum, #7))
“
Fine’s a funny word, don’t you think? I don’t think there’s another like it in the English language
that says so much while actually saying so little. How many wives have told their husbands, “I’m
fine,” when they really mean, “I want to cut your balls off with a butcher knife”? How many men have
told their girlfriends, “You look fine,” when they really mean, “You need to go back to the gym and
work out—a lot.” It’s the universal way of saying we’re just peachy—when we’re really anything
but.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tangled (Tangled, #1))
“
So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the boys. Then those men are taught to be winners, or at least, losers that hate themselves.
”
”
Stephen Colbert (I Am America (And So Can You!))
“
He was the most perfectly formed man she'd ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who'd whistled at her but she'd pretended she hadn't heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, indolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them.
”
”
Jude Deveraux (Sweet Liar (Montgomery/Taggert, #18))
“
I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn't even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.
For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
“
In the front was a man he knew only as “Samson,” a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held together with nails and twine. Behind him in a rough line were the flagellates: five men also stripped to the waist, holding various chains, heavy corded ropes, and one with what looked like a leather whip from the S&M sex shop. They beat their backs as they slowly walked down the center of the street.
”
”
Joseph M. Chiron (Tagged: The Apocalypse)
“
Sex appeal wasn’t created in a gym with weights and treadmills. No, it was born in powerful, grungy garages where men, real fucking men worked with their hands. Where they got so dirty, they had to use a special manly soap to clean themselves up. You can’t find that shit at Bath & Body. Pure fucking testosterone.
”
”
Amy Daws (Wait With Me (Wait With Me, #1))
“
The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or art director says.
Like Tyler says, even a souffle looks pumped.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk
“
The average gym junkie today is all about appearance, not ability. Flash, not function. These men may have big, artificially pumped up limbs, but all that the size is in the muscle tissue; their
tendons and joints are weak . Ask the average muscleman to do a deep one-leg squat-ass-to-floor-style-and his knee ligaments would probably snap in two. What strength most bodybuilders do have, they cannot use in a coordinated way; if you asked them to walk on their hands they'd fall flat on their faces.
”
”
Paul Wade (Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength)
“
Some men’s chests are more buttlike than some women’s butts.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
She is awake. Again she thinks about fear. Until then, she had not been aware of fear, she had been convinced that she did not feel fear, not even when they had taken the group of men out from the gym, or when she had heard the burst of gunfire. She listens. She knows now that fear is the absence of all emotion, it is emptiness, it is as if your whole body is drained of blood all at once.
”
”
Slavenka Drakulić (S.)
“
Tag was a tall man, towering well over six feet two if she had to hasten a guess. She’d seen him working out in boxing shorts many times, so didn’t have to speculate at his body type. It was fit and lean with muscles. Definition on every limb, not an ounce of body fat, many would drool over. Not her. She looked at him—not as a woman would—and saw how his jawline was sharp and curved into a strong chin. Dusted in fine wheat colored hair to match that on top of his head. He wore it in the style she’d seen a lot of men wearing here at the gym. Shaved around the sides with a step to the longer hair on top. He kept it neat and swept off to one side.
Being in Tag’s presence always put an anxious gallop into her heart.
It raced through her chest, and she forced her feet to hold before she skittered off like a lunatic.
Lord, she was pathetic to get this worked up over a man who’d been nothing but kind.
”
”
V. Theia (Prince Charming (Renegade Souls MC #9))
“
Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.
”
”
Aubrey Gordon (What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat)
“
nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
“
Most men spend quality time at the gym room because of what they see at a woman's full and finely-formed breasts.
”
”
Anyaele Sam Chiyson (The Sagacity of Sage)
“
Manny has swung with many men, but many men never seen Manny's blissful swing.
”
”
Anthony Liccione
“
But men and women are different in the way that they feel loved. Men like to be admired for what they do, for their integrity and their accomplishments, whether it’s at work or at the gym or mowing the lawn, because it makes them feel manly. When a woman tells a man that she is proud of him, or she tells him that he did a good job, he’ll about bend over backwards to take care of her and love her.”
“But women like attention from men, because it makes them feel feminine and adored. That’s why they’re always fixin’ themselves up, doing their hair, wearing pretty clothes and makeup and jewelry and perfume. It’s all to attract your attention, you know.” (Thelma Jenkins)
”
”
Carol McCormick
“
What’s in the box?”
Sloane glanced to her hands. Box? Oh!
“Cupcakes. For you.” A flush heated her skin, but she forced herself to ignore it. “Kind of a thank you for doing this today.”
“You brought me cupcakes?”
It had been a dumb idea, bringing cupcakes to a gym. To a guy who looked like Sloane—he obviously didn’t eat a lot of sweets.
“You can throw them away.”
“Hey, Michaels, I’ll take the cupcakes,” one of the men shouted.
Sloane’s eyes took on a tinge of smoldering sienna color. He snapped his head around toward the man. “Touch them and die, Carson. She brought them for me.” He took the box from her and shoved them under his right arm. A grin broke out over his face. “Right, Kat? Just for me.
”
”
Jennifer Lyon (The Proposition (The Plus One Chronicles, #1))
“
For the first time in a decade I felt a voice rising from deep inside my soul. It cried out ‘what will you be today?’ and I heard ‘relentless’ booming from the rafters inside an old gym as Sami and a group of young men chased dreams and trophies while their fathers went to war.
”
”
Tucker Elliot (The Rainy Season)
“
More than six thousand people reported which sporting activities would make a member of the opposite sex more attractive. Results revealed that 57 percent of women found climbing attractive, making it the sexiest sport from a female perspective. This was closely followed by extreme sports (56 percent), soccer (52 percent), and hiking (51 percent). At the bottom of the list came aerobics and golf, with just 9 percent and 13 percent of the vote, respectively. In contrast, men were most attracted to women who did aerobics (70 percent), followed by those who took yoga (65 percent), and those who went to the gym (64 percent). At the bottom of their list came golf (18 percent), rugby (6 percent), and bodybuilding (5 percent). Women’s choices appeared to reflect the type of psychological qualities that they find attractive, such as bravery and a willingness to take on challenges, while men appeared to be looking for a woman who was physically fit without appearing muscle-bound. No one, it seemed, was attracted to golfers.
”
”
Richard Wiseman (59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot)
“
The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales.
I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time.
If Alanis Morrissette can play God (banned) in Dogma (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")?
Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men).
As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.
”
”
Denise Duhamel
“
You lose fat at the table and build muscle in the gym. Never forget that.
”
”
Ken D. Berry (Kicking Ass After 50: The Guide to Optimal Health for Men Fifty and Over)
“
Goddamn golf shirts and gym memberships and fake muscles and tans and cell phones and new cars. Trevor didn't care about any of that garbage. All he wanted was a garden. Isn't that funny?
”
”
Nickolas Butler (The Hearts of Men)
“
The rain is letting up, Mr. B. What do you want to do?'
'Oh, I’m gonna go fix the Weed Eater, and then, I’m gonna do dog patrol. At 97, I gotta find ways to keep moving!' He pushes himself up from the table. 'See ya later, kiddo.'
Joe has decided to get fit. Every day he hops onto our stationary bike that we left sitting on the back porch. He says it helps his balance. He times himself to ensure he rides it ten minutes a day. I bring him a glass of cool water to keep him hydrated. He refuses the water. 'I’m not used to drinking water, Miss.' His exercise routine would never be approved by a local gym.
”
”
Lynn Byk quoting Mister B.
“
Spiderman and Superman were closeted bodybuilders: they wore bodysuits that decently covered their flesh and masks that disguised their identity; their lives were rigidly divided between body-less bourgeois respectability and muscular super-hero fantasy; they led a 'double-life' that no one knew about and were never to be seen at the gym.
”
”
Mark Simpson (Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity)
“
The name is Mr. Mehta," Sam interrupted. "Sam is for friends."
"Do you have friends?" Daisy inquired. "You don't look the type."
"Of course I have friends." He'd lost touch with many of them after Nisha's accident, but he still saw John regularly at the gym, along with his sparring partner, Evan.
"Are they imaginary or real?" Daisy gave him a condescending smile. "I'm guessing imaginary because no one wants to be friends with a jerk."
Sam scowled. "This is a place of business. If you wish to socialize, I suggest you go elsewhere."
"He's cute when he's annoyed," Daisy said. "Maybe you should keep him around for eye-candy purposes."
Layla gave him a sideways glance through the thicket of her lashes. "Don't compliment him. His ego is already so big, his top shirt button is about to pop."
The women chuckled and Sam's jaw tightened. Women adored him. Men admired him. Employees detested him. But no one ever, ever dismissed him. "He is, in fact, sitting right here."
"We're very aware of your presence." Daisy flashed him a sultry smile. "It's hard to miss the steam coming out of your ears.
”
”
Sara Desai (The Marriage Game (Marriage Game, #1))
“
Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful
to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress
alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty
myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral.
Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like
Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep
of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps
those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared
into the uniform shades of mud.
At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick
Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale
secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female
Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them
this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went
to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to
check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography
black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no
buyers.
Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may
have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his
buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they
are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they
are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when
they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless:
exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not
make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us.
Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable,
even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and
valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984
that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health,
energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all
had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies.
They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely
overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in
their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they
looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning
the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their
own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect
sense.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
My world had stopped, but the outside one kept going. On Saturday, one week after the murder, Bubba had a basketball game. He wanted to go. I wanted him to go, too.
And if he went, I was going, too. Even though I hadn’t been out of the house except to go to the funeral home.
A friend picked Bubba up early so he could get there for the pregame warm-up. When it came time to leave to watch the game, I decided to run rather than drive. It was five minutes by car, and I thought it wouldn’t take long to trot over.
I was wrong about that.
Four or five of the men at the house accompanied me, including my brother-in-law Jeff, who had just gone through an operation and was still recovering. I’m sure his rehab plan didn’t include running alongside a half-crazy woman, but he did anyway, without a complaint or even a “Hey, slow down.”
We got to the church gym just in time for the game. I felt such pure joy watching Bubba play. It was one of the very few times that whole month that I was able to completely forget my grief and feel fully myself. They were fleeting moments, but they loom large now in my memory, little islands of relief in a sea of dread.
We all walked home. The men tossed a ball back and forth with Bubba. They couldn’t replace Chris, but they provided an enormous, unstated reassurance to Bubba that he would never be alone.
”
”
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
“
In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.
”
”
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
“
With the mistaken premise that my stay-at-home work and his accomplished career required equal emotional energy, I couldn’t understand where he got the vigor to worry about his ego being rejected or his sex drive being ignored. For me, it was all hands on deck, between our kids and our house and our work. Sex, passion, romance, I thought, could certainly wait. And maybe some part of me reasoned that when I had suffered a loss, he had been too busy to support me. So what could he possibly ask of me now? But now, in the fresh mental air of my momspringa, I start to understand the kind of neglect John must have felt when I fell asleep in one of the kids’ beds every night or stopped kissing him hello and instead threw a preschooler into his arms the minute he walked in the door. At the moment I’m walking in his shoes: my children are cared for by someone else, my days are spent in rich mental exercise, I get plenty of sleep, and I go to the gym every day. In other words, I have the emotional energy to think about desire and how good it feels to be wanted. Yes, John had clean pressed shirts without having to ask, and yes, we had family dinners together that looked perfect and tasted as good, and yes, he never had to be on call when Joe started getting bullied for the first time or when Cori’s tampon leaked at a diving tournament. Yet while I was bending over backward to meet his children’s every need, his own were going ignored. And was it the chicken or the egg that started that ball rolling? If he had, only once, driven the carpool in my place, would I have suddenly wanted to greet him at the door in Saran Wrap? Or was I so incredibly consumed with the worry-work of motherhood that no contribution from him would have made me look up from my kids? I don’t know. I only know that in this month, when I have gotten time with friends, time for myself, positive attention from men, and yep, a couple of nice new bras, parts of me that were asleep for far too long are starting to wake up. I am seeing my children with a new, longer lens and seeing how grown up they are, how capable. I am seeing John as the lonely, troubled man he was when he walked out on us and understanding, for the first time, what part I played in that. I am seeing Talia’s lifestyle choices—singlehood, careerism, passionate pursuits—as less outrageous and more reasonable than ever before. And most startling of all, I am seeing myself looking down the barrel of another six years of single parenting, martyrdom, and self-neglect and feeling very, very conflicted.
”
”
Kelly Harms (The Overdue Life of Amy Byler)
“
newer marshals,” Newman added. “I was glad when they invited them to teach you new guys. That much field experience shouldn’t go to waste.” “A lot of them are stake-and-hammer guys though,” Newman said. “Old-fashioned doesn’t begin to cover their methods.” “The hunter that taught me the ropes was like that.” “I thought Forrester was your mentor. He’s known for his gun knowledge,” Livingston said. “You get that off his Wikipedia page?” I asked. “No, he worked a case that a buddy of mine was on. My friend is a gun nut, and he loved Forrester’s arsenal. He said that Forrester even used a flamethrower.” “Yep, that’s Ted,” I said, shaking my head. “So, he wasn’t your first mentor?” “No, Manny Rodriguez was. He taught me how to raise zombies and how to kill vampires.” “What happened to him?” Newman asked. “His wife thought he was getting too old and forced him to retire from the hunting side of things.” “It is not a job for old men,” Olaf said. “I guess it isn’t, but I wasn’t ready to fly solo when Manny retired. I was lucky I didn’t get killed doing jobs on my own at first.” “When did Forrester start training you?” Livingston asked. “Soon enough to help me stay alive.” “Ted spoke highly of you from the beginning,” Olaf said. “He does not give unearned praise. Are you being humble?” “No, I don’t . . . I really did have some close calls when Manny first retired, or maybe I just missed having backup.” Hazel brought our coffee and my Coke. “I’ll be back to fill those waters up, and with the juice,” she said before she left again. I so wanted to start questioning her, but this was Newman’s warrant and everyone else besides Olaf was local. They knew Hazel. I didn’t. I’d let them play it for now. The coffee was fresh and hot and surprisingly good for a mass-produced cup. I did add sugar and cream, so it wasn’t great coffee, but I didn’t add much, so it wasn’t bad either. Olaf put in way more sugar than I did, so his cup would have been too sweet for me. He didn’t take cream. I guessed we could be snobby about each other’s coffee habits later. “But it was Forrester who taught you how to fight empty hand?” Livingston asked. “I had some martial arts when we met, but he started me on more real-world training that worked outside of a judo mat or a martial arts tournament.” “I thought he was out of New Mexico,” Livingston said. “He is.” “And you’re in St. Louis, Missouri.” “I am.” “Hard to train long-distance.” “I have people I train with at home.” “How often do you train?” Kaitlin asked. “At least three times a week in hand-to-hand and blade.” “Really that often?” Newman asked. “Yeah. How often do you train?” “I go to the range two, three times a month.” “Any martial arts?” I asked. “I go to the gym three times a week.
”
”
Laurell K. Hamilton (Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27))
“
You never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance-obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off. Even if she’d been a perfectly toned and manicured gym junkie, Joel would still have left her. His “lack of attraction” had nothing to do with her. He hadn’t left her for something better, but for something new.
”
”
Liane Moriarty (Nine Perfect Strangers)
“
There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.
”
”
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
“
Fine’s a funny word, don’t you think? I don’t think there’s another like it in the English language that says so much while actually saying so little. How many wives have told their husbands, “I’m fine,” when they really mean, “I want to cut your balls off with a butcher knife?” How many men have told their girlfriends, “You look fine,” when they really mean, “You need to go back to the gym and work out – a lot.” It’s the universal way of saying we’re just peachy – when we’re really anything but.
”
”
Emma Chase (Tangled (Tangled, #1))
“
All over America, you see women in yoga pants and men in sweatpants, even when they are not on their way to or from a yoga class or softball field. When I fly, I see so many sweat suits – even pajamas – on my fellow travelers that it’s as though the airplane were the sleeper car of a train bound for summer camp or a gym in the sky, not a public space for business people and vacationers.
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Tim Gunn (Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible)
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Most of the men and women at the gym are working towards the same goal.
"The perfect female body.
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Nitya Prakash
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All that is to say that the dark is our friend, and this is precisely what it was invented for. Most of us spend most of our time in the daylight, however, so it behooves us to get to the gym.
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Jill Conner Browne (The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love: A Fallen Southern Belle's Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage, and Being Prepared)
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You should try the lavender spray. Very relaxing. If you open the second drawer, she’s got eye masks.” “What the hell are you doing in the women’s bathroom?” Theo had to ask. His friend looked incongruous sitting there in his gym clothes amidst the frilly feminine décor. “I’m chilling while I wait for my appointment with Kai. And I’m in here because it’s nice and I like it, and if you have a problem with it go to the men’s room. Also, I am not hanging out here to find a girlfriend. I was told not to do that anymore. Now I only come for the granola bars and the fine, fine scent of lavender.
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Lexi Blake (Submission is Not Enough (Masters and Mercenaries #12))
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It takes about 10 calories a day just to keep one pound of muscle alive, for both men and women, even if you are completely inactive. An extra five pounds of muscle can burn up to 1500 calories in a month–that’s the equivalent of 5 pounds of fat per year, which more than reverses the negative affects of aging on your metabolism. But with consistent aerobic exercise, over time, you’re far more likely to burn five pounds of muscle. That means your body will burn about 50 less calories a day. And as your body becomes more efficient at running, that 195 calories you burn on the treadmill will decrease to about 125. So let’s do the math: You burn 125 calories above your resting metabolic rate each day you do aerobic exercise. Then subtract the 50 calories you do not burn due to muscle loss caused by this exercise. After all your huffing and puffing you are only burning 75 calories more than if you were sitting in front of the tube, doing nothing at all. That’s undone by drinking half a Coke or “rehydrating” with 12 ounces of Gatorade. This is the reason why millions of people, at gyms across the world, are unable to look and perform as they’d like after countless hours of “cardio.
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Mark Lauren (You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises)
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Men’s RMR 10 × weight (kg) + 6.25 × height (cm) – 5 × age + 5
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Mark Lauren (You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises)
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So”—I swallow my mouthful—“you’re a skiing instructor. Riven is a doctor. What about Cole? Is he a gym teacher? Drill sergeant? Evil dictator?
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Lily Gold (Three Swedish Mountain Men)
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A row of gas cans was waiting for them. “Start on that side and work your way back to me.” She massaged one bicep with her free hand. “Lighting Logan's house on fire was hard work. I should probably go to the gym more often.
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Bella Andre (Wild Heat (Hot Shots: Men of Fire, #1))
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didn’t mind the fencing. Maybe even liked it. “It’s like Darwin’s law got repealed. Call it the rule of the weak.” “Okay.” “You think women can tell which men are the fittest anymore? They can’t. You see a guy who’s really cut and buff and wearing a muscle shirt to show it off, and you can figure he spends all his time in the gym, but you know something? Odds are he’s a faggot.” “Or a WrestleMania champ.” Another flash of annoyance; I’d gone too far. “I mean, look at these guys.” He waved at the wall, at the hostages on the other side. “This country was made by guys like
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Joseph Finder (Power Play)
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Absolutely, says Steve Maxwell. And with the little device in his pocket, he can prove it. Steve is a former world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter and now a strength-and-conditioning coach who specializes in recovering lost innovations. “The old-timers knew what was up with fascia long before we even had a word for it,” he explains. “You’ll always be safe if you go back to the mighty men of old, the guys before the 1950s. Look at the old gyms, with their Indian clubs and medicine balls. What’s that all about if not balance, range of motion, being fluid, using elastic recoil?
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Christopher McDougall (Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance)
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It’s six. We’re closed. You need to leave, or I’ll call the police.” Eddie said, “Asshole fed.” They were glaring at me when Eddie suddenly focused on something behind me, and his face sagged. “Oh shit.” I turned as Rudy J reached behind his desk for a baseball bat, and then the door opened. A tough-looking Asian man in a nice suit and sunglasses swaggered in first. He had been born with a thick neck and large bones, but time in a gym gave him sharp cuts and rude angles. He grinned when he saw the baseball bat, then stepped aside as two more Asian men pushed the third brother inside ahead of them. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. They were lean and hard with no-bullshit expressions, and something told me they weren’t police officers. The
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Robert Crais (Taken (Elvis Cole, #15; Joe Pike, #4))
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He hoped it didn’t show on his face that just looking at her in the dim firelight was a treat, a delight. Her hair all mussed from bed, her feet bare, her cheeks pinked up from anxiety, she almost took his breath away. He knew she was skittish around men to the point that she couldn’t even go to a coed gym to work out, and he didn’t delude himself that he was exempt from that category, not even after all the time they’d had together. Oh, perhaps at the moment, as they shared a couch with a couple of feet separating them. But if he tried to get too close right now, she would freak. Bolt. Melt down. “Maybe
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Robyn Carr (Whispering Rock (Virgin River, #3))
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HERE’S SOMETHING I HEARD RECENTLY: “MEN move toward whatever makes them feel competent.” As soon as I heard that I knew it was true. Every man I know migrates toward something that makes him feel powerful and in control. If it’s work, he puts in more hours, if it’s sports he’s constantly at the gym. I only bring this up because few men I know feel competent in intimate relationships, which might be one of the reasons they don’t sit around talking about how well they do or don’t get along with the people they love.
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Donald Miller (Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy)
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She stopped at the foot of the trio of beach chairs and smiled down at Richter and his men. Richter was in the middle. The one on the left was a hairy beast of a man with the fat-over-muscle build of someone who’d earned their conditioning from life experience, not a gym bike. Someone who possessed the brute core strength to physically break you. The man on the right was younger and leaner, but still carried plenty of brawn. It squared with Isaiah’s story—these weren’t techie savants hired to pull a sophisticated vault break. Richter was lining up big scary men to storm a hotel room and take down an army of casino thugs by force.
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Blake Crouch (Good Behavior)
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Like most of the special operations community, their physical training centered on useful strength, cardiovascular endurance, and durability, which, as both of them were pushing age forty, was increasingly important. Looking like a steroid-fueled bodybuilder was not part of the equation and was a liability in terms of both physical performance and blending into civilian populations. Their workouts pulled elements from various coaches and training programs, including CrossFit, Gym Jones, and StrongFirst. The idea wasn’t to be able to compete with endurance athletes, power lifters, or alpinists, but to achieve a broad-based level of fitness that would allow them to perform well in each of those areas. After a series of warm-up exercises that most would consider a serious workout, they completed the strength and endurance Hero WOD “Murph,” named in honor of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Mike Murphy. Wearing their body armor, they started with one hundred burpees followed by four one-hundred-yard buddy carries. Then it was right into a two-mile run, one hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred air squats, followed by another two-mile run. Both men powered through, thinking of the scores of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who didn’t make it home.
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Jack Carr (The Terminal List, True Believer, and Savage Son)
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Men who prioritize momentry pleasures and personal obsessions over family time and connection forfeit the privilege of having a family. Their selfish addiction to gym, work, TV, and sports reveals a misguided priority, leaving their loved ones emotionally starved and heartsick. Family is a sacred trust, requiring nurture and presence. Let us not neglect our sacred responsibility, lest we suffer the consequences of a family in pain and a home in shambles.
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Shaila Touchton
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Let’s bring the "men" back into mental health —because, let’s face it, toughing it out in silence isn’t the flex it’s cracked up to be. Real strength isn’t about bottling it up; it’s about opening up. Mental health isn’t just for one gender—it’s for everyone. It’s time to ditch the macho act & normalize men talking about their feelings, because emotional wellness isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a power move. Let’s get real, guys: taking care of your mind is as important as hitting the gym!
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Life is Positive
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MenZnow" provides useful information for building a healthy body with a focus on fitness.
Information and columns on sports such as gym, muscle, cycling, mountain climbing, climbing, walking and swimming.
Wisdom that you want to incorporate into your daily life, such as dieting and eating. Lifestyle itself, fashion & gear, etc.
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menznow
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You never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance-obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off. Even if she’d been a perfectly to ed and manicured gym junkie, Joel would still have left her. His “lack of attraction” had nothing to do with her. He hadn’t left her for something better, but for something new.
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Liane Moriarty (Nine Perfect Strangers)
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So, my program develops the entire spectrum of physical skills: Muscular Strength, Muscular Endurance, Cardiovascular Endurance, Power, Speed, Coordination, Balance, and Flexibility. The degree to which you possess these eight physical qualities defines your level of fitness. It is only by focusing on these seven skills, rather than appearance, that you will make your best gains, in ability, well-being, and in appearance. The washboard stomachs, big chests, round shoulders, and shirt-sleeve-stretching biceps of my men are testament to that, as are the toned legs, tight triceps and abs of the women I’ve trained.
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Mark Lauren (You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises)
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Vegetables. Fruits. Nuts. Seeds. Meats. Eggs. Fish. That’s it. For millions of years our ancestors survived purely from these 7 things. Typically, the women gathered the nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables while men hunted for meat. Together these food sources provided the necessary components of a complete diet that sustained healthy living. Climate, geography, and luck mainly determined how balanced these sources were. But remember, regardless of how much of each food they ate, these were the only foods available to our ancestors, so naturally our bodies have adapted to their consumption. It wasn’t until about ten thousand years ago, a blip in our time on Earth, with the cultivation of plants and domestication of animals, that large quantities of breads, potatoes, rice, pasta, and dairy became available. These relatively new sources of calories were the main reason our complex societies were able to develop, and our overabundance is to a large degree due to them. However, for millions of years our bodies evolved on diets without any of these. The relatively miniscule time span since the domestication of plants and animals has not prepared us to live healthy lives with diets consisting of too many breads, pastas, rice, and potatoes. Yes, life expectancy has greatly increased in this time span, but this can be attributed not to new foods, but rather to man’s no longer having to live life on-the-go while dealing with hunger, thirst, illness, injuries, extreme cold, and fighting dangerous animals with primitive tools. So think of these new calories as little more than fillers. If you find yourself overwhelmed by nutritional definitions and rules, just ask yourself this: For millions of years before the domestication of plants and animals, what did we eat?
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Mark Lauren (You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises)
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Building the right body begins with a single decision, but it's fueled by a thousand moments of determination.
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Emmanuel Apetsi
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The boys walked into the gym, where hundreds of Navajo filled the stands, even three hours before their game. Players spotted mothers and grandparents, uncles and aunties and cousins, brothers and sisters and neighbors, folks who’d piled into old pickup trucks and vans and Chevy sedans to make that three-hour drive. There were Chinle stars who graduated last year and the year before that and the decade before that, young men who bathed still in past glory. There was Cecil Henry, a nearly sixty-year-old silversmith with a rakish mustache and an easy smile and a mighty thirst for the bottle, who crafted and sold beautiful jewelry to tourists on the floor of Canyon de Chelly. He once played high school basketball and ran like a deer and was related to a few of the Wildcats. He’d stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked here from Chinle.
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Michael Powell (Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation)
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Until that point, most Americans associated the concept of “the gym” with bodybuilding, an almost entirely male subculture that was considered deviant, the progeny of circus acts and freak shows. Bodybuilders were perceived as somehow both too feminine—often suspected to be homosexuals because they spent so much time around other men and cared about the way they looked—and too masculine, grotesquely muscled and projecting conspicuous strength.
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Heather Radke (Butts: A Backstory)
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gym.” That’s a lot—and enough to make your head spin. To make matters worse, many women want to have it all, and do it all. Maas says, “That’s a deadly quality. Men are much better at parking stress. They obviously have a lot to do, too, but they’re more likely to say: let’s call it a day. Women often keep going, both in their work and in their heads. Worry is a big part of perfectionism. You keep going over your to-
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Maartje Willems (The Lost Art of Doing Nothing: How the Dutch Unwind with Niksen)
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Men have only a certain amount of energy ... one can make war - a time-honored tradition, but we'll waive that, of course. One can make love. Or one can run about the block, hit balls over nets, pump heavy weights up and down in a gym. Americans like to do these things. The French much less. That's why we're better lovers.
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Michelle Granas (Amadea: One Spring in France)
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I don’t find it surprising that super-old people are so odd and grumpy. Half their friends are dead, they feel like shit most of the time, and the next major event in their lives is going to be their last. They don’t even have the salve of believing that going to the gym is going to make things better, that they’ll meet someone cute in the small hours of a Friday night or that their career is going to suddenly steer into an upturn and they’ll wind up married to a movie star. They’re out the other side of all that, onto a flat, gray plain of aches and bad eyesight, of feeling the cold in their bones and having little to do except watch their children and grandchildren go right ahead and make all the mistakes they warned them about.
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Michael Marshall (The Straw Men)
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It’s always the people who most hate the idea of turning into their parents who end up doing so. The millennials blame the boomers for wrecking the country, yet rather than break free from their influence, we continue seeing the world in their terms. Our social justice activities devote their lives to the same causes, with only the most minute updates in terminology but an agenda otherwise unchanged. Our rebels wear the same Che Guevara T-shirts, do the same drugs, obsess over the same music. I remember being surprised back in high school that the stoners cutting class behind the gym all had Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd patches on their jackets, and not anything more contemporary.
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Helen Andrews (Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster)
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In India, horns function as turn signals, brake lights, hand gestures, prayers.
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Sallie Tisdale (Great Buddha Gym for All Mens and Womens)
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I do,” I said. “I know I frighten a lot of men,” she said. “You know—beautiful, educated, rich. Men feel threatened.” “I’m trying to be brave,” I said. “I think you are really good-looking too,” she said. “Guys at the gym are always telling me that,” I said. “It’s hard being alone,” she said. “And being a woman. I’m counting on you.” “Little lady,” I said, “you’re in good hands.” “Are you laughing at me?” “With,” I said. “Laughing with.
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Robert B. Parker (Bad Business (Spenser, #31))
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Once you’d been in a boxing gym like the Southchurch Boys’ Club you could never get it out of your system. And once you’d trained in a boxing gym as long as Dan, the sensation was always there, like the memory of a passionate kiss. The first time anyone visits a boxing gym, what hits them is the smell, thick with men’s sweat - not the unwashed stink of fermented body odour, but the layered, built-up saline scent of constant work and leather and old-worn sports kit. And as soon as you’re past the smell, what gets you next is in the rough-edged environment. At some point every man in a boxing gym knows he is going to fight, and he is definitely going to get hurt.
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Solomon Carter (The First Cases: A Roberts and Bradley Box Set)
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An incel is angry about being a virgin. You’re an angry guy. Six billion enemies, zero friends, zero-plus lovers. Furious. So many resentments. I’m just wondering who you were really trying to kill. Some girl who brushed you off? Some guy at the gym or on the Israeli border? Maybe your mother? That’s what one of my friends thinks, and she’s a lot smarter than me. Was I the proxy murderee? Whose face did you see when you were stabbing me?This conversation is over.No, no. The point about this is, it’s happening in my head, so it’s not over until my head says it is. You don’t even have to think of things to say. I’ll put the words into your mouth.Then they will be worthless.I’m thinking about some other killers who were motivated by religion: the men in the hijacked airplanes on September 11, 2001, and the men in Mumbai murderously attacking the Taj Palace and Oberoi hotels, a Jewish Chabad center, and the much-loved Leopold Café, on November 26, 2008.
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Salman Rushdie (Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder)
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there’s nothing scarier to me than a group of men who go to the gym a lot, wear tight shirts, and are out enjoying a “boy’s night” fueled by vodka, Red Bull, and cologne from Walgreens.
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Whitney Cummings (I'm Fine...And Other Lies)