Why doesn't the gym foster community?

Going to the gym is a solitary experience. Everyone has headphones in, they avoid eye contact, they're focused on their own routine. If you're going to spend hours of your life in the gym, chasing the path of the iron gods, you'd think it might come with new friendships. But it rarely does, and that feels like a shame. Surely the path could be forged together—yet there's so little appetite for conversation. Even the people who spot me, correct my form, or ask how many sets I've got left never really talk beyond that. And neither do I.

This seems unlike other hobbies where there's natural common ground for conversation. Take partner dance classes, for example—you rotate partners, creating an easy way to strike up a new conversation every five minutes or so. As you bump into these people more often, you naturally get to know them better. The gym has nothing like this built in. There's no structure that allows conversation to flow naturally, and it almost feels impolite to start talking to someone mid-workout.

Perhaps gym classes would solve this problem. Tom's gripe with classes is that he doesn't like being told what to do when exercising—he trusts himself to know how to achieve his goals. I don't like classes because they cater more towards flexibility or weight loss rather than bodybuilding. Maybe it's my loss that my brain resists classes, but I want to push back against this being the default solution for socialising.

That's not to say people don't socialise at all. There are regular outliers who bump fists with people they know and catch up a little on life before parting ways to queue for the pec fly machine. These people, however, are probably nothing more than gym acquaintances. They don't hang about outside the gym or grab food together.

What strikes me is this paradox: in a place with so many people sharing the same hobby, why doesn't it naturally lend itself to conversation? Gyms are loud, energetic spaces, yet somehow they've developed the social norms of a library.

I feel like at this point I ought to say something useful, but I'm here merely to state my puzzlement. Maybe gym-goers simply aren't that interested in community—we're there for personal goals, not social ones. But that seems like a missed opportunity when hobbies are usually such great ways to make lifelong friends and even partners.

If we wanted to bake community into the gym experience, what would that even look like? We have run clubs that seem great for finding friends and have become infamous for finding partners—so why don't we have gym clubs?

The obvious answer is that the analogy doesn't quite work. Run clubs naturally foster conversation because you run alongside each other, accommodate various skill levels easily, and finish together at a designated spot. The gym resists this structure. Even in HIIT classes, equipment is spread out and you're meant to be going at it intensely—hardly ideal for chatting. A weights-focused gym club would mean people taking turns on equipment, which kills any natural flow or rhythm.

But perhaps this is a puzzle worth solving. Running figured out how to be social—surely lifting could too, with the right format.