‘Welcome to Cape Town: don’t stick out as a tourist and if you have any insecurities about your appearance rather catch the next plane home.” It’s the kind of sound advice Cape Town Tourism should include in its welcome guide.
Let’s face it, Capetonian men are a brawny bunch. I guess it’s that melange of being a beach town, a gay town and, arguably, a superficial town that has bestowed on it a concentration of gym bodies to rival Los Angeles or Rio. Having relocated here from Ireland, a country more noted for its six packs of Guinness than its six packs of abs, I was clearly in for a rude awakening when I made my first trip to the city’s trendiest gym …
Picture it: 7pm and peak-time as I make my entrance. Scores of cross trainers, stair masters and treadmills are occupied to capacity. Blasting out of the gym’s sound system is Madonna but with the number of iPod users present, Papa Don’t Preach — The Remix is rendered slightly redundant. I amble over to the crowded weights area. Noticing the only vacant bench press, I territorially place my towel on it before pausing to take a look around me.
About a dozen men are in my vicinity — most with impressive physiques by anyone’s standards. Two guys in their thirties, who’d make worthy cover models, are spotting each other on the incline press. A younger guy with a rugby build has just completed a taxing set of bench presses. He uses some of his rest time to throw a discreet eye over to the guy next to him to see how much weight he’s using on the same exercise. In the foreground is a massively built West African who effortlessly pumps out hefty dumbbell curls and seems to have garnered the unspoken envy of everyone watching him.
With so many Olympic-like bodies around me, my initial adrenalin upon arrival is overshadowed by a relapse into physical inadequacy. I may have thought I looked buff in the mirror of my apartment block lift 10 minutes earlier, but here in the iron jungle I am brutally reminded of my inferior muscle mass. My body has grappled with image woes since adolescence as I was a sickly teenager and moving to the Mother City clearly was fuelling that fire. Down, but not out, I give kudos to the fact that my gym peers are bigger than me, but I wonder whether these men actually feel any better about their bodies than I do about mine.
You’d think they would — after all, we’re the most muscular generation in centuries. In the buffness stakes we might even give the Ancient Greeks a run for their Drachmas. And we’re feeling great. Right? Well, I for one am feeling the pinch. Credit where credit is due, I can recognise the feel-good endorphins gyming releases as much as the next gym bunny. But, seeing as the stress I’m busting in the first place is body related, it’s rather a vicious cycle. The writing’s been on my wall for some time now.
The fairer sex has been pressured to look a certain way for years and it was inevitable that men would fall victim to the same trend. There is a growing pressure on the modern man to embody the perfect male images we see around us every day. And, with every passing year, the ideal male body seems to go an extra rung up the muscle ladder. From fitness magazine models to the guy from the Gilette commercials, images of the increasingly muscular body beautiful are ubiquitous. Even shop-window mannequins are in on the act, having evolved into “built” figures with washboard stomachs. Buff is the new black, eight packs are the new six packs: muscle is en vogue and the more of it, the merrier.
As an upshot, gyms have mushroomed everywhere in Cape Town and supplements are big business too. But fitness is taking second stage to aesthetics. While some of the guys around me could easily bench 90kg, a short treadmill run would prove demanding. Roids are all the rage; I am offered them at my gym more often than I get offered dagga walking down Long Street. And as much as a chunkier frame entices me, the thought of receiving an epidural of illegal hormones is something I just ain’t buying for now.
Despite the gym addiction I guess many men don’t see their gains. They never quite see themselves as others do and perhaps still view themselves as either the skinny or fat teenager they once were. I wondered whether the svelte guy next to me felt any better about how he looked than I did or was he too just aiming for a bigger and leaner physique. And, dare I say it, could I have been a source of envy in the eyes of the rotund newcomer sweating on the treadmill?
Sitting there on the pec deck two thoughts lay on my mind: First, the goal posts of the ideal body are ever-widening and amid this culture of “cut or gain” there seem to be no takers to simply maintain. So, is the body I will be content with always going to be one more bicep inch, one less percentage of body fat or one more supplement cycle away?
And second: Who does Madonna listen to when she is working out?