‘Outdated' gym act caught on camera

News.com.au

02-05-2025

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An avid gymgoer has called out a couple who made snide comments about her standard exercise routine.
Kiahny, 22, is an area manager for another fitness chain but the most local version of that gym is an hour away, prompting her to join a different studio closer to home.
She signed up at the beginning of March, and attends whenever she is at home instead of having to make the hour-long commute.
The NSW woman said she had been training in gyms since she was 16, and was recently filming herself perform a Romanian dead lift. The move involved holding weights and hinging at the hips while keeping her knees straight.
It's an exercise used to strengthen the posterior chain.
'It was the first day of my new program, because I have a coach, and I'd gone in and set up my RDLs,' she told news.com.au, adding she was filming to get approval on her form.
She completed a warm-up set with just the bar, before adding more and more weight to it. At that point an older couple started to set up on the equipment behind where Kiahny was performing her RDLs.
'I started hearing them say a few things about my exercise and how it was right in front of them,' she said.
'I ignored it a little bit and it wasn't until I'd gone back and started listening to the video I realised there was a lot more to it.'
She said she'd set up the barbell first, but they were implying that somehow Kiahny was in the wrong and doing an 'unusual' exercise. She said at no point had the couple asked her about the exercise, and she said if they had then it would have been a non-issue.
'The way it was coming across was that I was somehow being inappropriate. There were a lot of comments about 'This is not the machine to be using' and things like that because they were right behind me,' she said.
'They were making it out like I was a problem for doing an exercise in front of them — even though I was there first and it wasn't a crazy exercise.'
She said she was wearing standard gym shorts, and not bikini bottoms.
Kiahny took to TikTok to share a small snippet of the two-minute interaction, with many commenting their shock at the behaviour.
'It's the gym? what else are you meant to be doing? I'm genuinely confused,' one said.
Another added: 'The way this would give me anxiety for 6 months if I ever heard this in my video recording.'
'This is so normal to me, I'm struggling to understand what their issue is,' one social media user said.
Another person commented: 'He's trying to hard to convince his gf that he's not mirin your gains.'
Someone else weighed in: 'No are we all just having rough times in the gym at the moment. I swear I've been training on and off for six to eight years but this year has been BAD for older people just being AWFUL.'
Kiahny said she was surprised about how many people reached out to her with similar stories, with one telling her that someone approached her at the gym and told her she needed to do more cardio to lose weight.
It shocked the fitness professional, who said gyms are a place where people go to better themselves and you have no idea why someone is there.
'To have people like this in the gym who are commenting on and putting other people down, I feel like it's such a dangerous thing because it really impacts how someone has seen the gym,' she said.
On the work side of things, she said she'd never witnessed or heard of behaviour like this. She said positive gym atmosphere is so important and it needed to be a safe space, adding that negative gym culture is outdated, and so the experience she had and the messages she got were a shock to her.
Kiahny said for anyone who has experienced this, at the end of the day if people are saying something negative it's likely coming from an internal place and was no reflection of the target of the comment.