By Three months ago, I thought I'd be spending July counting my many rippling abs. The plan was to get ripped – shriekingly, mind-bendingly shredded. I was going to cultivate the kind of body that turns you into a local dignitary.
'There he goes,' people would whisper to each other as the midsummer sun played on my gigantic, granite-hard arse, 'this postcode's most outrageously beeftacular man.' Maybe the council would ask me to front a campaign about crossing the road safely.
That's dream's conclusively in the bin now. Like most people who decided lockdown was the perfect time to get strong – as if the only thing that had been stopping us before was a lack of communicable respiratory diseases – the return of the pub, amateur sport and a general summer holiday malaise has put paid to it.
It started quite well. Despite not being particularly athletic, I thought it might actually happen. Back in April I tried to get a few mates on Zoom a few times a week and rotate who picked which YouTube session we'd all do together, like a healthy Russian Roulette. We did them all: cardio HIIT sessions, Yoga With Adriene, Yoga Without Adriene, a barre class that should be reclassified as ABH. Then it turned into one mate, then every other week, and then just me, and then I stopped turning up too.
On reflection, it's a bit strange that the first thing I thought to spend this enforced separation on was to get truly, worryingly gigantic. It was boring, and it made my legs hurt, and I hated it, but it felt like the thing to do. That intensity of conviction that the middle of a pandemic was the right time to knock out a couple of King Lears while getting absolutely fucking shredded mate might have been an under-addressed symptom of endtimes-induced mental distress. As things have loosened, so has the urge to get the lats of a mid-sized bison.
But where had it come from? I was never going to go the full Lou Ferrigno, but I did suddenly think I could transform my slightly lumpy if basically fine weekend cricketer's body. I wasn't alone either. Why, given an expanse of time to fill and the entirety of human culture to pick from, did loads of us choose to aim to become gigantic?
Beyond wanting to put off death as long as possible, it's an attempt to show that you've got absolutely everything under control. Working and working and working a muscle until it's at its optimum is self-improvement as a spectacle. Reading a lot is a great use of your time, but endless Insta posts of your William Carlos Williams collections are going to get annoying very quickly. A quick peek at your heaving pecs, though? Knock yourself out.
It's not just aesthetic either. Our bodies are – often pointlessly and cruelly – moralised. However deeply you've tried to bury the instinct, a flat stomach and huge shoulders still feels on some fundamental level like rock-solid proof you've mastered self-denial, perseverance, and all those other abstractions that Victorian schoolmasters were into. It doesn't make it true, but that feeling persists.
It's really just a facet of that feeling that somewhere out there, still waiting for you to catch up with it, is the maximal version of yourself: better read, a Kurosawa connoisseur, with a nicer flat and a flourishing herb garden, making decent headway into learning Debussy's Nocturnes and conversational Italian, maybe four inches taller.
That short-lived urge to get hench was just the most bombastic expression of the old, played-out idea of masculinity as control of all things. Obviously I'm not saying every gym bunny's a psychopath, but that yearning for mastery can be poisonous and destructive, especially at a time when giving up control is just a fact of life. In years to come, we'll hopefully realise that a global pandemic wasn't quite the unrivalled opportunity for endless squatting it briefly looked like.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more delivered straight to your inbox
Need some positivity right now? Subscribe to Esquire now for a hit of style, fitness, culture and advice from the experts
