This new year, you may find yourself in the gym. The aim, of course, is to mitigate the effects of the gallon of brandy butter consumed over Christmas. But you may also be trying to build the ‘new you’ (clichés abound when it comes to fitness). Yet as a Spectator reader, you might soon find yourself strangely at home.

That’s because the gym is a curiously conservative space. Partly that’s down to the kind of people it attracts, but also because of its existing clientele: disaffected young men. Last year, a Guardian columnist was mocked for stating this, but anyone who’s spent time in a squat rack knows it’s true. Bench pressing more than 100kg won’t see you suddenly possessed by the spirit of Andrew Tate, but it’s rare for a lifter not to awaken a conservative streak they never knew they had.

This effect has led to the pillorying of gym culture by some. Podcasts and news articles regularly cite weightlifting as a gateway to becoming outright nasty. Yet the connection between gyms and conservatism is a good and healthy one. It can actually help with the very problem that Guardian columnists and Mumsnet groups fret about: ‘toxic masculinity’.

Like many gym-goers, I arrived by the typical route. After a three-month gap year travelling across the US with a friend (both hoping, like Colin in Love Actually, that on hearing our accents we’d be pounced upon by scores........

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