First, let’s go over why fans exist. For support…ironically enough, the same for both versions of the word “fan,” only the fans I’m talking about support you to keep on running and working out. If at a gym, the most common things to quarrel over and that gets peoples’ feathers all ruffled up are work out machines and fans, another type of machine. Either you’re waiting for a person to get off the elliptical, so you can hop on and get that part of your workout out of the way, like ripping off a Band-Aid, or you’re quarreling over the fan with some other sweaty person. These are the two, seemingly, most common dilemmas I’ve witnessed in a gym.
At my old gym, where mainly only the old went, we’d be moving the fans from where they sat plugged in originally to our own little areas. If you’re running on the treadmill and someone unplugs the fan and walks it on over to their side of the gym, you’re not in much of a place to stop them (because you’re running in place), unless you want to stop your workout, and they know this—this is called strategic timing on their part. People will be doing a workout routine in their own little corner of the gym with the fan plugged into a position to blow mainly on them and if they walk away, the fan is fair game. In other words, if you leave your workout area in a gym where fan can be manually moved and is not attached to the walls, then you’re running the risk of someone taking your fan before you come back from a water break—again, strategic timing on their part.
Yet, a gym with a fan detached from the wall to be plugged in any place with an outlet isn’t the only kind of gym whose patrons suffer from the fan dilemma. Oh, no, it is also gyms with fans built into the walls in such a way that they rotate from left to right when turned on. This, I discovered recently, is also, a dilemma. You can escape a gym for another gym, but you can never escape the dilemma of the fan.
The question, you may ask, is how a fan that blows in all different directions when rotating causes dilemma when it’s giving air to everyone in that area. The answer lies in people who subscribe to the heat theory. The heat theory (most likely not its technical, official name) is the belief that it’s better to lift weights and work out when you’re hot, rather than when cool air is blowing on you. I should know. I witnessed a recent altercation between two people at the gym arguing over if the fan should be on or not.
Both sides brought up points of their own—one’s side made the point of the senselessness of putting a fan at arm level, so as to pull the string on to turn it on, if you’re not supposed to have the fan on when working out in a gym; the other side made the point that the fan was not meant to be turned on because it’s not good to have air blowing on you when doing the bench press because it’s more effective of a workout if you’re hot—this, my friends, is the heat theory.
I, personally, like a cool blast of air every now and then, when hot and sweaty, to refresh and for it to blow some life back into me to continue my workout, whereas others prefer to be working out in a place where the heat resembles that of the Sahara Desert because they subscribe to the heat theory, thinking cool air is “counterintuitive,” as the woman in the altercation put it, to doing the bench press. Traditionally, the word “counterintuitive” means “contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation,” making little sense in her explanation, so the heat theory, as she described it, when arguing on behalf of not turning on the fan, made little sense to me, upon overhearing it.
Since I was in the blast of cool air when the fan was turned on, I, personally, am a fan of the fan, while others apparently are not. Obviously, people use the fan when doing the bench press or else the gym would not have the fan in that area of the weights section because it would make little sense of people did not use it. People like to believe they each serve a purpose in life, let the fan serve its purpose—so, to subscribers of the heat theory, I say, go with the wind.