Why Most People At Your Gym Are Fitter Than You
Shutterstock
It all comes down to a form of the friendship paradox, which is how most people's friends are more popular than they are. That paradox happens because most people have a small number of friends but some people have a large number of friends and those people push up the average number of friends for everyone else.
Something similar happens at the gym. Let's assume most members of my gym (including me) go only 2-3 times a week, but some members are fitness nuts who go every day. Since those fitness nuts go more than everyone else, the set of people in the gym will always be disproportionately weighted toward them. Thus I may go to the gym an average number of times for members of my gym, but any time I go to the gym I am surrounded by people who go more than I do on average (Planet Fitness memorably portrayed this feeling in its Gymtimidation ad).
This reassuring insight resulted from research for our recent list: 16 Paradoxes That Will Make Your Head Explode »
- 2 states where home prices are falling because there are too many houses and not enough buyers
- US buys 81 Soviet-era combat aircraft from Russia's ally costing on average less than $20,000 each, report says
- A couple accidentally shipped their cat in an Amazon return package. It arrived safely 6 days later, hundreds of miles away.
- 9 health benefits of drinking sugarcane juice in summer
- 10 benefits of incorporating almond oil into your daily diet
- From heart health to detoxification: 10 reasons to eat beetroot
- Why did a NASA spacecraft suddenly start talking gibberish after more than 45 years of operation? What fixed it?
- ICICI Bank shares climb nearly 5% after Q4 earnings; mcap soars by ₹36,555.4 crore