Gyms wants people to have gym buds, with whom they buy expensive carb-infused juices onsite and with whom they swap tips about trainers and teachers. And now gyms want people to feel a little more at ease in that most sensitive space: the men’s locker room.
Designers have rid locker rooms of the gnarly shower curtains, trading them in for glass escape pods. They have made bathroom stalls more private. Comfy couch corners, Wi-Fi and lockers with built-in locks have gone from swank options to standard issue.
“Everyone wants to get upgraded now,” said Rudy Fabiano, an architect who estimates he has designed about 500 gyms in the past 25 years.
Photo: Bloomberg
However, gyms are still unable to provide the one thing younger men in particular seem to really want: a way for them to shower and change without actually being nude.
Each day, thousands of men in locker rooms nationwide struggle to put on their underwear while still covered chastely in shower towels, like horrible breathless arthropods molting into something tender-skinned. They writhe, still moist, into fresh clothes.
“In the last 20 years, maybe 25 years, there’s a huge cultural shift in people that ultimately affects gyms,” said Bryan Dunkelberger, a founding principal of S3 Design, which has worked for clients like Equinox and the Sports Club/LA.
“Old-timers, guys that are 60-plus, have no problem with a gang shower and whatever,” Dunkelberger said.
“The Gen X-ers are a little bit more sensitive to what they’re spending and what they’re expecting. And the millennials, these are the special children,” he said. “They expect all the amenities. They grew up in families that had YMCA or country club memberships. They expect certain things. Privacy, they expect.”
Showering after gym class in high school became virtually extinct in the 1990s. And if Manhattan’s high-end gyms were not riddled with ab-laden models and Europeans, there would be few under 40 who have spent any naked time with other men.
“It’s funny. They’re more socially open with everything — Facebook, social media — yet more private in their personal space,” David Barton Gym president Kevin Kavanaugh said.
Not long after the invention of the idea of personal space in 1959 came a classic 1970s study gamely titled: Personal Space Invasions in the Lavatory. In it, researchers spied upon urinals to see how long it took for men to begin emptying their bladders.
It took almost twice as long when there was a man at the next urinal and about half as long as when someone was one urinal away, compared with going it alone, the study said.
“Someone standing next to you at the subway station fully clothed is less close than someone standing next to you naked at a gym,” Dunkelberger said.
“Privacy and space is kind of where it’s at,” Fabiano said.
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