I have a confession to make: I am a gym grunter. Not all the time and certainly not on every exercise, but here and there, when the weights feel heavy, it just … helps? A sharp little exhale, a vocalisation of effort, maybe even a muttered “yup” as a barbell ascends. I’m not bellowing “Arnold!” on every movement, but I can get a bit noisy.
Is this so wrong? It depends who you ask. A recent study of more than 300 UK residents found that male grunting “diminishes perceptions of masculinity and both physical and social attractiveness” – though it does also, apparently, “enhance perceptions of social dominance”, which for some men is probably part of the point. Famously, US gym chain Planet Fitness has its own “lunk alarm”, a siren that can be activated when lifters get too loud, triggering a staff intervention. “Yesterday: me doing barbell stuff, which was hard,” journalist and writer Rose George recently tweeted. “I did it quietly. Next to me, two young men doing free weights, not too heavy. Grunt, huff, puff, grunt, huff. Why?”
Well, first of all, apologies to those who like their gyms silent and tranquil – but yes, it can improve performance. About a decade ago, a pair of studies found that grunting increased force production in athletes squeezing a hand-gripper and performing tennis shots, the latter finding that performance was “significantly enhanced”. More recently, a study of 20 mixed martial artists confirmed that grunting also seems to improve kicking power, though it’s interesting to note that a smaller, older study found no correlation between grunting and lifting heavy barbells off the floor. A bit of well-placed profanity might also work: a study published in the journal Psychology of Sports and Exercise found that athletes who swore during cycling and handgrip tests experienced significant increases in power and strength compared with those who used neutral words.
Bearing all this in mind, an obvious question is: why does it work? One possible explanation is that grunting triggers the body’s autonomic nervous system, responsible for the fight-flight-freeze response that primes us for physical action (though it’s important to note that the swearing study ruled this out). A little expression of exertion – or maybe a full-bore yelp – might simply let your body know that it’s OK to take the brakes off and try really hard, though it’s far from proven that this is what’s happening.
Another possibility is that it can sometimes be reflective of good lifting technique. There are two schools of thought about what to do when you start lifting stuff that’s heavy: you can either exhale during the strenuous bit (sensible if you’re doing a lot of repetitions), or hold your breath (helpful if you’re doing one or two very heavy moves). The second is known as the Valsalva manoeuvre, and can help you lift more weight by “bracing” the muscles around your midsection before they are more stable. It also sometimes causes a bit of a racket: once, I was doing this to haul a very heavy hex bar off the floor, and my wife wandered across the gym floor to ask me why I sounded like a wounded buffalo (I, completely oblivious, had my headphones on).
To be extremely charitable, there might also be one more reason why young men tend to grunt more than everyone else: the type of training they do hurts more. Traditionally, it has been thought that training to “failure” (for instance, doing curls until your arms simply won’t lift the weight) is the best way to build bigger muscles – and though a recent meta-analysis was pretty inconclusive on that point, training to failure certainly hurts. By contrast, “failing” when you’re trying to build strength is usually pretty counter-productive: you’re trying to teach your muscle fibres to fire together, rather than making them bigger. In other words: if you’re training for bigger biceps, that training might be pretty unpleasant, but if you’re just trying to make your biceps stronger, it doesn’t have to be horrible.
So where does all this leave us? Well, just like being in the quiet coach, it’s really a question of operating within the spirit of the rules, and not spoiling things for everyone else. In an ideal world, everyone would grunt exactly as much as they need to get the most from their training – no more, no less – and we’d have no need for lunk alarms, sternly worded chalkboards or disapproving glances. As a rule of thumb, maybe we should treat grunts like writer Elmore Leonard treats exclamation marks – one or two per workout is fine; anything else is overkill. Oh, and if you really want to try yelling out the Governator’s name during your shoulder presses, give it a go. Just don’t blame me if you end up on TikTok.
