Name: Rage workouts.
Age: Would this be a good time to invoke Aristotle’s beliefs on catharsis?
Appearance: Pumped-up, red-faced, veiny, on the brink of a disciplinary hearing.
Is this about being angry at the gym? Because, this morning there was a guy just sitting, using his phone, on the machine I needed … You’re close, but you’re not quite right. This isn’t about getting angry while you’re exercising, it’s about getting angry in order to exercise.
What are we talking here? Blowing off a bit of steam? Listening to Eminem? It mainly seems to involve pummelling a tractor tyre with a sledgehammer.
That’s just a high-rep shoulder and core workout. Yes, but it’s the symbolism that counts. You could be hitting anything with that sledgehammer.
Like my tumble dryer that just broke, or the car that cut me up yesterday. Now you’re getting it.
Isn’t all exercise a bit angry, really? Well, yes. But increasingly the anger is the point. In Knoxville, Tennessee, there’s a rage room Hiit class where attenders can take out their frustrations on a succession of ropes, punchbags and, yes, tractor tyres.
Oh, wow. And in Newcastle, England, there’s a feminine rage class, where attenders scream with anger as they punch and lunge. Lauren Peters, who attends the class regularly, told the New York Post that the screaming is “guttural and loud and emotional and exactly what we all need”.
Aren’t there actual rage rooms for this? Sure. There’s a growing number of places where, for a fee, you get to spend an hour whaling on ceramics and old appliances with a baseball bat. But that’s expensive and difficult to clean up.
This sounds like a perfect alternative. It isn’t quite that simple. In 2002, Brad Bushman of Iowa State University published a paper on the best way to defuse anger, and this ain’t it.
No? Of course not. Physically venting your anger actually increases it, he found. In fact, he wrote that people who hit inanimate objects when they’re angry are basically just “practising how to behave aggressively”.
So, people who go to these classes are just making themselves angrier? Well, that study seems to suggest catharsis is a really terrible way of getting anger out of your system.
Really? What’s better? Get this – doing nothing at all.
That can’t be true. Apparently so. In his tests, Bushman found that the least angry people in his research were the control group, who just sat quietly for two minutes instead of hitting anything.
So, no hammers and tyres? No. Instead, join my new gym. It’s completely empty and you don’t have to lift a finger. You’ll calm down and I’ll get rich. Win-win.
Do say: “I am wildly angry all the time.”
Don’t say: “Can’t I just internalise it until my nervous system gives out?”
