How Are University Gyms Used by Staff and Students? A Mixed-Method Study Exploring Gym Use, Motivation, and Communication in Three UK Gyms

Abstract

This study examined university gym use by staff and students using mixed methods: participant observation and an e-survey. Research in three UK universities entailed 16 observation sessions and an e-survey that reached 3396 students and staff. The research focused on gym use, the gym environment, the presentation of the self, and social interaction within gym spaces. The gyms were found to have a difficult role to play in providing functionality for some, while helping others to be active and minimize feelings of isolation and lack of control. This led to these gyms developing spaces of exercise rather than therapeutic spaces, and divisions in use of space, with some areas rarely used and often highly gendered, resulting in contested meanings produced within Healthy University discourses and physical activities.

Narrative Review of Sex Differences in Muscle Strength, Endurance, Activation, Size, Fiber Type, and Strength Training Participation Rates, Preferences, Motivations, Injuries, and Neuromuscular Adaptations

“…Women are less comfortable with strength training equipment, and women are more comfortable using cardiovascular than strength training equipment (398). This helps to explain why greater proportions of women use cardiovascular equipment (86%) than strength training machines (47%) and free weights (34%) (371) and also why women perform strength training less frequently than men. Women also say they have less knowledge of free weights and plate-loaded machines than body weight exercises (215).…”

“…Equipment Type (Use of, Comfort With, and Knowledge of) Men and women do not have the same preferences for or knowledge of strength training equipment (65,184,215,371,373,398,433,472) (Table 8). Women are less comfortable with strength training equipment, and women are more comfortable using cardiovascular than strength training equipment (398).…”

Physical Culture

“…In this Edition, two examples from the cultures of life in the gym point to the significance of this idea of the sociality of physical culture: Amy Clark's [53] article explores women's embodied experiences of 'the gaze' in a mix-gendered UK gym, where bodies in movement creates a sociality in which the 'male gaze' produces many negative affects for the female gym users experiences and yet many women find ways to resist. Frances Rapport and colleagues' [54] article similarly shows how university gym use by staff and students results in the emergence of a variety of forms of affectivity that shape experience and subsequent actions in important ways. Finally, the exploratory article by Patricia Robles [55] considers how inequalities prevalent in broader society, such as naturalised gendered discourses about the potentialities of the female body in movement, become physicalised, reproduced, and challenged through the affective practices and movements of female freestyle wrestlers in Spain.…”

A Blind Man Leads a Blind Man? Personalised Nutrition-Related Attitudes, Knowledge and Behaviours of Fitness Trainers in Hungary

“…There has been a worldwide increasing tendency in the attendance of fitness clubs (Thompson) [1] with the aim to begin a weight-loss journey (Rapport et al) [2]; therefore, the number of gyms and personal trainers is collaterally growing as well. A gym is an ideal place for health improvement (Damásio et al [3] and Dabija et al [4]), where, in addition to exercising, conversations about nutrition also play a role of high priority, and, for that reason, fitness enthusiasts look for nutrition advice (Howley and Franks) [5], since this is a favourable possibility to establish and fix optimal nutritional Table 1.…”