Public gym in Taipei. Photograph courtesy of Vivian Hu.
It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.
The Instagram Trainer
I met him online, at a vulnerable moment, during one of the worst winters of my life. It was a year into the pandemic and I had just moved to Upstate New York for graduate school, which was being held over Zoom, and I was going through a breakup. A friend of a friend had been working out with him IRL and had reposted a few of his stories. Out of curiosity, I’d clicked on his profile—@bootiesbyarthur. “NJ’s PERSONAL TRAINER, Hour glass specialist 
,” his bio read. His profile was full of videos of ample-buttocked women doing jump squats and hip thrusts.
“TRANSFORMATION WEDNESDAYS 
,” one post read, featuring before-and-after photos of a young, ethnically ambiguous woman in a bikini.
Men lie, Women lie, RESULTS DON’T LIE. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending
#tranformationwednesday #fitnessmotivation #personaltrainer #girlsthatlift #slimthickfit #gymmotivation
Arthur worked primarily out of a shared gym space in New Jersey where he trained dozens of people regularly, but he also did online and in-home coaching around the tristate area. Because I was not local, he recommended I sign up for his online program. For $200 a month, I received a weekly workout plan (“DAY 1: LEGS, DAY 2: UPPER-BODY DAY, 1 DAY OFF,” et cetera), diet plan, and one thirty-minute combined check-in and workout session over FaceTime per month. I could purchase additional workout sessions at a cost of thirty dollars per meeting.
In Arthur’s workout plan, “LEG DAY” meant goblet squats, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions (via a leg-extension machine), and hamstring curls. “UPPER-BODY DAY” included dumbbell shoulder presses, dumbbell bicep curls, single-arm dumbbell low rows, planks, and leg lifts, and each exercise was customizable. I ordered a set of dumbbells, and when I told Arthur that the university gym was still shut down, he gave me substitute exercises—Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells instead of the leg extensions and step-ups instead of the hamstring curls—that I could do at home instead.
Arthur told me to text him anytime with questions—“Legit 24/7 at your service : )”—and to let him know each time I completed a workout. Before my first session, I sent him my “before” photos, as instructed. Using the self-timer on my phone, I photographed myself in my underwear from the back, side, and front—and in response he emailed me a motivational message. “First day today ! Video your workouts and tag meeee i wanna see how you’re form and tempo 
kill it .”
I was a relative newbie to this kind of strength training, and although I had looked up each exercise on YouTube, the first workouts made me feel ashamed and annoyed with myself. I could barely get through the first set of goblet squats, not to mention do three more ten-rep sets, as Arthur wanted. I couldn’t do even a single push-up. It’s clear to me now that I had no idea what I was doing. “we have to fix your form and positioning don’t worry it’s better than most when they first start LOL,” Arthur texted after my first workout, during which I’d recorded a video of myself doing each exercise. “Keep the dumbbells closer to your legs and slow the tempo down.” After a few exchanges like this, though, and especially after our FaceTime meetings, I began to gain confidence and strength.
Arthur was a kind and knowledgeable trainer. During our FaceTime sessions—which he often held from his car, parked outside his next client’s house—he would correct my form and yell motivating things like, “You got it, girl!” In between sets, he explained the rationale behind the exercises we were doing (“The swing motion activates the entire backside, aka the largest muscles in our bodies for maximum engagement,” I remember him telling me) and gossiped about his other clients. “I trained Tyga last week,” he told me once. “At his New Jersey pad.”
“OMG, was Kylie there?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “There were a lot of people at the house.”
“Actually, I think they broke up.”
“I see.”
That night, I did a Google image search for Tyga. His arms, though well defined, looked smaller than mine. I wondered how much Tyga could bench. I imagined Arthur yelling at him to do fifty sumo squats.
I decided to add some additional one-on-one sessions each week. I loved the idea of Arthur yelling at me from his car. Somehow it made receiving personal training—which I thought of as a bourgeois luxury—feel like a good deal. Thirty dollars per session seemed extraordinarily cheap, especially for access to someone who was training a celebrity.
Although we only met once per week, Arthur and I were in touch a lot. “I just did the whole workout T_T except the core LOL,” I texted him one afternoon. “I’m gonna do the core tonight. And some yoga too. I imagined ur voice in my head yelling at me. I didn’t give up.”
“Lmfaooo aye,” Arthur texted back. “You’re gunna love the sessions when you actually meet me Lmfaoo. Or you’ll hate me. Or both LOLLL.”
“Hate and love are very connected,” I replied.
I had vaguely mentioned that receiving a meal plan might be “triggering” for me, and so at first Arthur didn’t send one. But then I decided, what the hell, why not embrace the process? The plan consisted of four meals per day, one of which was a smoothie. The directions for the others went something like this: “Meal 1: 4 egg whites with ½ cup any mixed green vegetables; 1 cup blueberries or strawberries, 2 PCs turkey bacon = 26 G protein, 20 g carbs, 8 g fat.” Or: “Meal 4: 8 oz whitefish, 1 cup broccoli, 1 cup spinach, ¼ cup white rice = 27 G protein, 22 g carbs, 4 g fat.” The plan included one “cheat meal” per week (“so you can have a normal date night,” Arthur explained).
But trying to plan out my food in that way made me want to die, so I mostly ate Chipotle. I had a routine. I would order three double-chicken burrito bowls on Uber Eats, then get a giant grocery-store container of salad, and eat a big scoop of burrito bowl dumped on top of a pile of salad for every meal. Each order lasted me about a week. I thought it was the closest I could get to following Arthur’s meal plan without actually having to think about what I was eating. In this way, I survived a winter upstate without a car.
Whenever Arthur checked in on my diet or asked about my weight, I lied. “I’ll weigh myself tomorrow at the gym,” I told him, more than a few times. “I’m bloated now, but I’ll take a pic next week.”
As we continued working out, we fell into a nice rhythm, and I did see myself growing stronger and leaner as time went on. But I also wasn’t taking very good care of myself, and I started getting careless: During one workout, I was feeling guilty about spending the week in bed avoiding Zoom school, so I tried pushing myself and doubled the weight I used for dead-lift rows. I’d been working out for several weeks and figured my body should be able to handle it.
There was no sound, but I remember the feeling—a sharp slipping out of place, at the base of my spine—and then a knowing, familiar dread spread throughout my body. “I wanna do legs w u, but I kind of hurt my back yesterday LOL,” I texted Arthur the next day. Then, the day after: “Tbh my back is rly bad LOL I think I need to rest it for like a week. I can barely move. I’m going to a PT tomorrow. Lmao.”
“Omgg. Whattttt”
I did not know it yet, but I had triggered an old back injury, making it hard to even stand up straight, much less lift a dumbbell. I spent the rest of the summer trying, but mostly failing, to ignore the pain that extended down my legs. Bed rest and acupuncture and massage therapy helped, but the smallest things could trigger a flare-up—lifting a bag of laundry, or sitting on a backless stool for too long, or climbing a steep set of stairs. For the next few years, my life would be oriented around managing this pain, instead of actually doing anything about it, like seeing a doctor or going to physical therapy. I accepted it as simply another layer of my life.
That fall, Arthur opened his own studio—the BBA (Booties by Arthur) training facility. He announced it on Instagram, posting a video of himself cutting a red ribbon under an archway of black and gold balloons. I hearted the post. It would be years before I tried lifting again.
Equinox. Photograph by Vivian Hu.
The Luxury Health Club: Equinox Hudson Yards
“It’s not fitness. It’s life.” That was the Equinox slogan. For years, I had been alternately annoyed by and drawn to the chain of luxury health clubs, which I imagined as being full of private equity analysts and, for a brief moment, Gawker Media employees, who used to receive a membership as part of their benefits package. I had been there as a guest a few times over the years, but I wanted more. It was summer of 2021, everyone was vaccinated, and I’d just received my $1,400 stimulus check. I was going to do as Rilke said and change my life.
I was lucky, said the membership adviser, a duck-lipped woman, because the company was running a promo. If I signed up before it was over, I wouldn’t have to pay an initiation fee and I’d get a free $150 credit at the Equinox store. For $325 per month, I could have access to almost any Equinox facility in the nation—even the NYC Printing House and Hudson Yards locations, which I coveted for their outdoor pools—and, though the sign-up offer required a twelve-month commitment, the membership adviser assured me I could cancel anytime by lying. “Just say you’re moving for school and email me your course schedule, or send a note from a doctor saying you sprained an ankle or something,” she said. “It won’t be a problem.”
My sister was away from the city, and I was living in her apartment in Hudson Yards. I decided to splurge. I figured I would go to the gym every day, and in this way I would get my money’s worth. Right away, I fell in love with the Hudson Yards Equinox. It had new steam rooms, an extra-spacious sauna, rainfall showerheads. I would wake up early and head immediately to the gym to take a long, hot shower and drench myself in Kiehl’s amino acid shampoo, then go in the hot tub for a bit, then head up to the roof-deck to work on my novel. I was one of many people typing away at their computers by the pool. I tried other locations—the Printing House location, with its rooftop pool and sundeck; the indoor pool at one of the Upper East Side locations—but nothing compared to Hudson Yards, with its airy café—EAT PRETTY, a pink neon sign read at the entrance—located in between the pool deck and indoor hot tub. Whenever I got hungry or bored, I could get a fourteen-dollar ginger tuna poke bowl, or an eight-dollar smoothie called “sleepy beauty” (with turmeric, collagen powder, spiced almond milk, and valerian root), or an eight-dollar coconut water, which was served in a real coconut.
There were always several people taking business calls from the roof-deck, and I liked to eavesdrop, listening to people talk about KPIs or ad spend or, once, what I believe was a man either firing or breaking up with someone. (“It’s just not a good fit. This will be better for both of us in the long run,” I remember him intoning). Of course, there were a lot of annoying people there, too. It was easy to look at the man arguing with the attendant managing the pool wait list (due to demand, there was often a wait of up to several hours for the outdoor pool in the afternoons and on weekends), or the person complaining that there wasn’t any last-minute availability for the Pilates class she wanted, and wonder: Didn’t these people have jobs? But of course I was there, too, racing in early on a weekday to claim a lounge chair, using up all the eucalyptus-infused towels, signing in to my Zoom pedagogy class—I was still in grad school—from the cafe, sheepishly unmuting myself when we were put into breakout rooms. I was there, filling my water bottle with spa water, tapping the digital kiosk in the women’s locker room throughout the day like a rat in a Skinner box to dispense a tiny plastic comb, a spiral hair tie, Ursa Major face wipes. I’d later pass these out to friends, which made me feel like a beautiful Robin Hood Oprah. (You get a comb, you get an organic tampon, you get a disposable razor!),
In the end, I didn’t do very much “working out” at Equinox. I was still recovering from my back injury, but it was more than that. I would sign up for fitness classes, then cancel right before the three-hour cancellation window. I would sign up for barre, or Pilates, or hot yoga, and then the class time would approach and I’d be filled with dread. Even when I did make it to class, I often bailed. Once, I got through ten minutes of a yoga class before I convinced myself I had left the stove on and needed to return home immediately. I hadn’t. Another time, I made it to a barre class, but after I checked in with the attendant, I decided I needed to go back down to the locker room to pee, and then that I needed to shower before I could return to the class, and by the time I was done, the class was over, which was maybe what I had wanted to happen all along.
Something about the idea of actually exercising at Equinox made me feel deeply anxious and inadequate. That summer, using my promotional sign-up store credit, I bought and then returned three different workout sets—usually some kind of high-tech sports bra and leggings, in coordinated, color-blocked patterns—from the Equinox boutique. I thought that if I could only buy the right pair of $200 leggings, or the perfect $80 sports bra, I would finally become a person who could work out at the gym. But I never found the right set.
Still, the beauty of the all-access membership was that I could go into any Equinox essentially anywhere, anytime. Whenever I had time to kill—if I needed to use the bathroom or if I had been at a particularly heavy lunch or happy hour—I could slip inside the nearest Equinox and take a shower and steam, buy a green juice, or slather myself in body butter. The morning after a date, I could look up the closest Equinox in Harlem or SoHo or Midtown East or Williamsburg or wherever I’d woken up, be greeted by name at the check-in counter, take an insanely hot shower, then steam out whatever poisons had seeped into my body. Each time, I felt a little closer to becoming the person I was meant to be.
The Equinox Pool. Photograph by Vivian Hu.
The Public Government Gym: Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center (臺北市中正運動中心)
Summer 2023: I was spending the summer with my mom visiting family in Thailand and Taiwan—our first time seeing them since before COVID—and we were in Taipei for the final month of our trip. I hadn’t hung out with anyone my own age in weeks.
I started going to the Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center—a public gym near Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall—because it was both cheap and a twelve-minute walk from our apartment. For fifty Taiwan dollars (about $1.50), I got an hour in the fitness center—a giant room with a large selection of pretty standard, though slightly rusty, workout machines, including four squat racks, a row of treadmills, and stationary bikes. For an additional fee (usually around 50–500 TWD per hour), I could access a table tennis area, a dance studio, a billiards room, a golf room, an air-gun shooting range, a badminton court, an archery field, and even an indoor swimming pool. I availed myself of very few of these options.
I liked to go on weekday afternoons, when the gym was relatively empty, and do a Stronglifts workout—a barbell workout which I’d learned about on the Reddit forum r/Fitness—for about an hour. Occasionally, the gym ran a promo: in exchange for paying up front for a two-hour pass to the fitness center, you’d get a free bottle of Pocari Sweat—basically Japanese Gatorade. I always took advantage of this deal. On those days, I would add in a thirtyish-minute treadmill session at the end of my workout, then stretch. To take advantage of the promo, I had to check in and pay for my time in the lobby downstairs and then I received a receipt with a QR code, which I scanned to enter and exit the fitness center area. We were required to bring a towel—I don’t know why, though I suspect it had to do with keeping sweat off the equipment—but anyone who forgot theirs could buy a bright pink hand towel at the FamilyMart next door for a hundred Taiwan dollars (three U.S. dollars). I accumulated several of these towels.
I loved the Tapei public gym. I could go there, do a workout, then leave without lingering—the opposite of Equinox. It was pure, functional gym. The equipment wasn’t particularly nice, and the bathrooms (which thankfully featured both squat and Western-style sit-down toilets) were humid and smelled especially bad in the summer months, but the gym was centrally located and had all the basics. It was almost never crowded, since most people went to one of the newer, nicer public gyms nearby. Usually, the other people there consisted of a group of older dad types who lifted together with a trainer instructing them, and skinny high schoolers similarly lifting in groups. There was the occasional foreigner, usually working out solo, like I was, but I only saw a few of them the entire summer. It was communal: When I wanted to use a foam roller, which was located behind the fitness center desk, the attendant explained that it was one of the personal trainer’s own foam rollers from home, but that I could use it if I promised to be very careful with it. I started to recognize the regulars and the desk attendants, and we’d smile and nod at one another knowingly, occasionally making small talk at the water fountains.
This specific public gym was older and thus bigger than a lot of the city’s newer gyms, which were built in a more densely populated Taipei, when real estate was sparse. It lived in the shadow of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, an imposing white monument whose vast scale and height surprised me each time I walked past it, no matter how many times I’d seen it, as if evoking the grand incomprehensibility of the past, of history. Most mornings and evenings, my mom and I did our daily walks through the gardens surrounding the monument—we’d get a vending machine milk tea or coffee, then people watch, observing tourists take photos in front of the cherry blossoms, or seniors doing Qigong, or high school dance groups practice their breakdancing routines on the pavement outside the National Concert Hall. My mother hadn’t lived in Taiwan in over three decades, more than half her life, but seeing these daily rituals made me feel close to her. I felt like I was glimpsing parts of her life from before she had me, when she was just a girl trying to decide what kind of person she should be.
The Boutique Health Club: ONE Health & Wellness (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania)
I found the space on Google Maps a day after moving to central Pennsylvania, where I was a writer in residence at a nearby liberal arts college for the fall semester. “It feels like a Zen garden,” one Google review said. ONE Health & Wellness advertised itself as a health studio offering infrared sauna therapy, cold plunge tubs, “functional strength training,” and jujitsu. “A cracked teapot serves no tea…” began its “Who We Are” page. “A stressed out, in pain, restless person cannot become the best version of themselves. Only a person who feels completely in control, who is pain-free and highly energetic, can achieve their dreams. This is the philosophy that drives us at ONE.”
The studio was located in a nondescript brick building on Market Street, and the owner-trainer, Ben, told me to come in for a free consultation. When I arrived at the studio, Ben was sitting barefoot in the lobby, doing work on his laptop. There was a check-in counter in front of a glass refrigerator filled with seltzers and kombuchas alongside a tub of Fage yogurt (Ben’s personal stash). There was a counter with a teakettle and several kinds of tea, as well as a few shelves along the wall, stocked with items like beef-tallow moisturizers (“It mimics the skin’s natural oils and composition,” Ben told me, which he said made it more effective than traditional lotions) and something called Jocko protein powder (which I did end up purchasing for forty dollars, though I found its monk-fruit-sweetened flavor a bit too cloying).
Ben asked me about my fitness goals, and I told him that I wanted to build strength and work on my foundations, even though that wasn’t totally true: I really just wanted to become as small as possible. I didn’t voice this, but right away he said, “People think being healthy means having a six-pack, or looking like what people in bikini competitions look like. But what they don’t know is that those guys are actually insanely unhealthy a lot of the time. People have no idea what it actually takes to get down to that level of leanness.”
He taught, instead, what he called “functional fitness.” The only equipment inside the studio consisted of a huge area of mats, where we worked out barefoot, and an array of maces, clubs, and kettlebells. “All the movements we do in here are designed to replicate the movements we do out in the real world,” he told me during our first session. Mace swings, kettlebell swings, overhead presses—all of them were focused on building the dynamic strength required to, say, lift a suitcase into an overhead bin or carry around a tote bag full of books without having debilitating shoulder pain the next day. “What do you want to be able to do in your life?” he’d often ask me. “Focus on that—on what you can do, rather than what your body looks like, and the looks part will naturally follow.”
He also discouraged dieting. Unlike the Instagram trainer, Ben told me to focus on getting enough protein—at least one hundred grams per day—and to make sure I was eating enough to build muscle. “You have to have enough lumber to build the house,” he said.
Our workouts were hard at first—whenever I swung a kettlebell between my legs, or tried to swing a mace around my entire body, I envisioned accidentally hitting myself with a steel weight or dropping the mace on my face. I also constantly worried that I might antagonize my back injury. When we did a particularly hard leg day, my back would seize up, and I worried I’d be in for another year of rehab before I could lift again. But Ben encouraged me to move through the pain. “The worst thing you can do for your body when it’s seizing up like that is not move it,” he told me when I came in the next day. We moved through it, taking it a little easier that day, and eventually the pain did go away. After several weeks of training, about halfway into the semester, I realized that my back pain had not returned—it was, in fact, the first time I’d been pain-free in nearly a decade.
Ben’s gym space had no mirrors save for a dirty, warped rectangle at the back, behind where the kettlebells were stored, whose warping made things appear wider than they were. I don’t know if that was intentional, but eventually I learned not to look—that it wasn’t the point. Between strength training and eating enough consistently for the first time in my life, I gained muscle and strength—toward the end of the semester, I could see the outline of my triceps when I flexed, and even the beginnings of my abs, which I’d always assumed didn’t exist. I hadn’t lost any weight, and in fact some of my clothes no longer fit, but I had learned to view myself and my body not as something inefficient that I needed to optimize, but as a living organism. Ben had a much longer-term approach to fitness than I’d been conditioned to expect. He emphasized that if I continued what we were doing, strength training two to three times per week and eating enough, I would lean out over three or four years. This was the opposite of the dieting and weight-loss messaging I’d received growing up—the cabbage soup diet taped to my childhood fridge that claimed to shed ten pounds in seven days; the apple cider vinegar “cleanses” and three- or five- or ten-day “juice fasts” that I’d been encouraged to try throughout my teens and twenties. “Your body is an amalgamation of everything you put into it, and everything you do with it,” Ben told me. “If you spend all your time hiking, your body will be the body of someone who hikes. If you spend all your time on the couch, your body will be the body of someone who spends all day on the couch. If you’re constantly worrying about dieting, your body will be the body of someone who is constantly worried about dieting. It’s that simple.”
At the end of the semester, I was sad to leave Pennsylvania—and Ben’s gym—behind. But I was looking ahead. Already, I was on Google Maps, searching for gym spaces in Oakland, where I was moving for the spring. There was a CrossFit studio, a yoga space that offered healing sound baths, a family-owned boutique gym operated out of an old warehouse; a local chain with indoor golf simulators and an Olympic-size pool. There were dance studios and barre studios and running clubs and cryotherapy spas and local YMCA chapters and kickboxing classes and MMA classes and climbing gyms and pole-dancing workshops and even a studio, run by ex-cons, that offered “prison-style boot camps.” All I had to do was pick one, and then become a person who went there.
Vivian Hu is a writer from Texas.
