5 other ways to get use out of your gym membership

Is a deltoid a muscle or a geometric shape that we forgot about while sleeping through high school math? Some ponder this, and yet so many of us have gym memberships!  Well, in order to re-inspire the masses to go, here are 5 ways to get the most out of your monthly dues:

1. Practice your 'O' Face

Almost true story:

Long ago, the brothers of Delta Upsilon Delta Eta held a meeting after they were informed that they made some of the most unattractive faces while pleasuring their ladies (or fellow brothers).  They communally discovered that, while pumping iron in front of a mirror, they have an opportunity to see why they were receiving one-star reviews on several of grindr Yelp.  From there spurned the underground club where D.U.D.E.s could practice their ‘O’s while in a safe, completely desexualized environment: the gym.  There, their gym fellow buddies could grade their ‘O’s while watching them pump iron, heave, and grunt (also entirely non-sexually) while wearing those shirts that show tasteful side boob.

2. Watch other practice their 'O' Face 

Does your crush happen to go to a gym that you work out at 3 times a year week?  Watch them lift weights in the mirror to judge whether their ‘O’ face and noise are something you can withstand.  If not, you have just saved yourself an awkward first encounter, dinner, drinks, 2^nd dinner, 3^rd date, meeting of the family, an oath to wait til marriage, and then an incredibly disappointing honeymoon.  Or, if you’re already one of the fellow ‘O’ facers gym buddies, watch and salivate and wait for the day they have too many shots of tequila and just want to “cuddle.”

3. Stave off the My Fitness Pal Guilt

Oh, sh*t

Have you ever reached that point (noon) in the day when you’ve already run out of your daily intakes of calories because, goddammit, that “healthy” smoothie was 600 calories.  Ok, it wasn’t a healthy smoothie, it was a Dairy Queen blizzard.  Okay, so you ate two of them… and then a Big Mac.  Pretending to go on the treadmill for 45 minutes will burn those calories that will allow you that.  Just set that treadmill for a 45 minute mile, enter in my fitness pal that you had an intense exercise session, and presto!  You have earned enough calories to consume that 2^nd Big Mac that you were eating while watching the treadmill move.

4.        Have a Fear of God (also known as the personal trainer)

When I first started working out regularly (shut up everyone that has ever met me) I got a personal trainer, a lady who actively participated—and regularly won—fitness competitions.  She was a nice person and a damn good trainer, but I just wasn’t ready to make the health and fitness commitments she suggested for me.  For about an hour twice a week she threw a leash on me and made me her bitch until I was fully sore and a little deader inside.  She also advised me to not eat sweets, which of course didn't happen.  I’d secretly keep a pack of M&Ms in my gym locker and, when she wasn’t looking, I’d consume a couple of my candy-coated concubines.  If she ever found out, I imagine that the scene would’ve been vaguely familiar to that part that Lucy Lawless appears in during the movie “Eurotrip.”

5.       Meet Orv

In every gym, in every city, all across the world, Orv is there waiting for you.  For whatever reason, every public work out facility has the quintessential naked old guy, with more wrinkles than Einstein had brain cells and less shame than my grandmother in public (read the gastric explosion).  No one truly knows where Orv comes from, why there are so many of him, or why he’s always naked, but this smiling old sycophant is always there to welcome you on the way to your locker… just be weary and don’t step on his balls on your walk by.