No, Really—These People Are Actually Down Bad, Crying at the Gym

Taylor Swift does not lead a relatable life. I, like you, do not lend out my private jet to other rich friends in a pinch, nor am I capable of buying out a luminescent white-sand beach in the Bahamas for a casual weekend getaway. My three-month situationships have never been the stuff of breathless tabloid coverage, and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve never dated an NFL player—much less one who was once the subject of his own Bachelor-style miniseries on the E! network. However, as the dust settles after the seismic impact of Swift’s 11^th album, The Tortured Poets Department, it has become clear that the singer can still pen a line or two that strikes a nerve with the masses. Like, for instance, the fact that a good cry at the gym is sometimes exactly what the doctor ordered.

The lyric in question appears on “Down Bad,” a maudlin track on what is ultimately an extremely maudlin record. Swift uses the chorus to announce that she is “down bad, crying at the gym,” completing the couplet with, “Fuck it if I can’t have him.” (The “him” in question appears to be Matty Healy, lead singer of the 1975, and someone who seems to have never been to a gym in his entire life.) It seemed like an innocuous kiss-off at first glance; one of the minor locutions Swift has deployed to express heartbreak over the past two decades. And yet, immediately after The Tortured Poets Department made landfall, the world swarmed over that gym line like it contained vital nutrients. I’ve seen it interpolated in lovelorn Bridgerton montages, emblazoned on subtle thirst traps, and, of course, printed on gimmicky T-shirts. The mental image of a billionaire pop singer breaking down into heaving sobs over—I don’t know—the triceps pulldown machine is a baffling one, and initially I thought that its cultural elevation had more to do with its raw meme potential than anything else. But then I found myself at a birthday party where the subject came up, and every woman attending, all of whom were in their early 30s, told me that not only have they cried at the gym, but that they believe the gym to be one of the ideal places to cry in the first place. (The men, apparently too macho and swollen with testosterone to relate, were completely mystified.) Swift was clearly on to something.

“The gym is a place where you can show up as you are and just do you. Broadly speaking, everyone is there with the same intention of taking care of themselves,” said Annie Demarest, who is studying to be a therapist, and who last cried while working out a few days after her 33^rd birthday. “I’d say it beats crying on a bench in Washington Square Park.”

Of course, Demarest doesn’t schedule her emotional breakdowns around her workout routines. However, when the feelings do come—usually unannounced—they can add an extra sense of cataclysmic vitality to the proceedings. “I let a few tears out and felt like, ‘OK, you’re fucking good to go,’ ” added Demarest, still recalling her most recent sob session. “Releasing bottled-up emotions, wherever you do it, can feel like sunshine after a summer storm.”

Demarest initially began to panic when she felt those tears coming on, but she’s of the belief that the gym, even a public gym, is a supportive space for all human expression. “There’s a natural sense of community, and if you fall into a routine, you end up seeing and working out alongside the same people,” she said. She managed to stifle her emotions before anyone noticed she was struggling, but in a worst-case scenario, where the waterworks really started pumping, she’s confident that “someone would’ve asked if I was OK.”

Demarest’s perspective makes perfect sense to me. I’ve never cried at the gym, but I absolutely believe that a heightened emotional state—be it envy, vindictiveness, or good old-fashioned opiating narcissism—can be wielded as a tool to keep you from just going through the motions. Mathew Sacco, a sports psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told me that while there is no evidence that tear-shedding will make someone’s physiological frame more supple and receptive to bulking or calorie-shredding, he does confirm that a link exists between whatever is going on between our ears and the intensity of our output.

“Emotions that elicit an adrenaline response, like anger, can push you. You can get a temporary boost of endurance,” said Sacco. “It’s not a reach whatsoever to say that those emotions are linked to how we get our personal best from working out.”

Of course, it must be reiterated that generally speaking, finding yourself on the brink of tears in the middle of an exercise regimen means that you might not be in a great place, mentally. Take Katie, a 31-year-old from California who works in music and asked me not to use her last name because she doesn’t want a man she refers to only as an “SOB” to know that he’s been making her cry during her workouts. Katie told me that she’s cried at the gym—typically on the treadmill—many times in the past, and usually, the culprit is a cocktail of long-gestating self-esteem issues. Like, for instance, feeling stalled and frustrated in your own fitness journey, and “forcing yourself to exercise even though you don’t want to.”

Of course, this brings us back to the SOB in question. Katie said he lied about having a partner and pursued her anyway. When everything fell apart, he called her a “homewrecker.” Now that’s the sort of incident that might have you down bad crying in the gym! Sure enough, Katie used the vacancy of her workout routine to, in her words, “rehash every conversation we ever had.”

“Tears come at the gym because you’re doing repetitive motions that don’t require a lot of thought,” she explained. “So if what’s on your mind is making you sad, you just ruminate on it.” Like Demarest, Katie said that her gym tears are of the silent, internal-screaming variety, and she’s never caused a scene in public. “Nobody is watching you,” added Katie. “So you have some sense of privacy.”

I think that goes for pretty much all gym criers. Sobbing in the middle of a workout is not a visible ritual—it’s a private one. We save the real disintegrations for bar bathroom stalls, or childhood bedrooms. In fact, when I reached out to fitness writer Ian Douglass, he told me the only time he’s ever witnessed a buckling meltdown at the gym was after a personal trainer got dumped by his girlfriend. (“Considering that he was cheating on her with someone else, I’d say he probably deserved it,” said Douglass.) Gyms are some of the only solitary arenas in public society. There’s a good chance nobody will be looking your way if you’re going through it during your dumbbell rows.

That said, Eliza Brooke, a writer in D.C. who also recently found herself crying while exercising, has a much dimmer perspective on the ritual compared to Katie and Demarest. In essence, Brooke said that she works out to feel good, to boost her mood, and to engage in all of the soft-focus #Wellness advice dispensed by the world’s aspiring Peloton instructors. So when Brooke starts shedding tears while breaking a sweat, she finds the experience much more humiliating than gratifying.

“It’s the worst of all worlds,” she explained. “You’re like, ‘How deep is my sadness that the endorphins aren’t working?’ ”

Thankfully, Brooke doesn’t have anything to worry about, because there is some scientific evidence tying a trip to the gym with a more general decline in our ability to Keep It Together. Sacco said that one of the main culprits of a sudden outburst is sleep deprivation, a symptom I think we have all experienced after, say, waking up at 4 a.m. to catch a flight or managing the proclivities of a newborn. Sacco asserts that the same psychological condition associated with fatigue—a ragged, worn-out prefrontal cortex—also presents itself in the midst of a grinding, body-eroding workout. “Our ability to keep that filter in place becomes compromised,” he said.

As for why it seems that women seemingly suffer these crises at a higher frequency than men? Your guess is as good as mine, but if we’re being honest, it’s likely because men—for centuries—have been conditioned to swallow their emotions, and there is some evidence that testosterone inhibits crying. (Statistically speaking, women are much more likely to shed emotional tears. Boys, we need to get our numbers up!) Brooke is baffled by this trend. “What are you guys doing when you’re exercising if not thinking about the biggest things in your life?” she wondered.

Personally, I’m in such a fugue state when I’m in the gym—often with a butt-rock playlist cranked up loud enough to make my headphones rattle—that my IQ drops to pretty much zero whenever I lift weights, which doesn’t leave much room for introspection. But for what it’s worth, I’m highly skeptical that Taylor Swift “works out” in the way we understand it. Last month, Page Six reported that Swift and Kelce booked a highly exclusive, appointment-only gym, with the contours of a CIA black site, for a private regimen which I can only imagine involved futuristic, non-Euclidian weights, perhaps forged in the Large Hadron Collider. This is not a woman who is renewing her Crunch membership, is what I’m saying. And yet, Swift has her finger on the pulse. The human condition is to be fighting for your life—physically and emotionally—on the elliptical.