ANT111 paper - Evan Price ANT 111 Kwame A gym is a place...

Evan Price
ANT 111
11/29/11
Kwame
A gym is a place where everyone has a common goal, to keep in shape.
Depending on the person, “to keep in shape” can mean a different thing. A younger man
is going to define that term much differently than an elderly woman and vice versa.
Personally, I go to the gym daily to keep in shape. I life weights to build my muscle mass
and run on the treadmill to keep my endurance level high. However, the gym
environments that I have been exposed to are very specific. I have only worked out in
fitness centers located on high school and college campuses. These fitness centers only
have students working out in them. Within the student bodies in the fitness centers,
stereotypes begin to develop. The male athletes are doing different exercises than the
females who are just looking to stay in shape. I have been exposed to the diversity in a
student-based gym and find it extremely interesting how methods of exercise affect the
stereotypes of each person in the fitness center. For this reason, I decided to take this
interest of mine, and explore it on a higher level that I am not familiar with. I decided to
go to a public fitness center where there are a range of ages, genders, and methods of
exercise to observe how the diversity of workouts affects the stereotypes in the gym.
Instead of being surrounded by only students, I was now surrounded by every type of
person. The various types of individuals that I had the privilege to observer were able to
answer the question, “how do methods of exercise effect the stereotypes within a fitness
center environment?”
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The public fitness center that I decided to conduct my research at was Ballys total
fitness center in Syracuse, NY. I conducted two one-hour observations at the gym along
with three interviews. As I oberserved, I realized that each kind of work out was home to
a different kind of person. The heavy weight section was mostly made up of young strong