The latest era of UniPol’s constant mode of self-improvement copped the gym some flack on students’ favourite complaint hub: UoO Meaningful Confessions Facebook page. “Wtf have unipol done” read the title of a post on March 3rd. The anonymous poster reckoned UniPol has ruined the heavy weight room with its latest rearrangement. The weights have been shifted, plants added, mirrors removed, and machines repositioned. “It’s free but I still want a refund for what they’ve done.” Enter Critic.
UniPol is all-access for tertiary students, paid through the $1,152 student services fee. But with around 44,000 full-time Otago students – Uni and Polytech combined – and only a certain capacity, UniPol can find it hard to cater to the masses. But boy do they try, with constant rearrangements fuelled by equal measures of complaints and long-time manager Dan Porter’s research.
Changes to UniPol have stemmed from Dan’s interest in continually evolving to meet every students’ needs. “So what’s it like to be in someone else’s shoes?” he asked. His research over summer included reading journals about body image called ‘Fat Studies’ which triggered “a really large part of what we’re doing.” In short, the journals discuss body somatotypes (genetics determining if someone’s naturally skinny, fat, or athletic) and “society’s dominant view” that anyone who was raised with the thinspo of the naughties is all too familiar with.
Dan stressed that it was “super important” for UniPol to be conscious of not having a “negative experience for students because we're simply following the dominant view of society.” He said that this “dominant view of society” was reinforced by images around us “effectively telling you what we should be, what we should be doing, what we should be eating, how we should be sleeping, how we should be engaging with other people, how we should be exercising. And it just keeps on going.”
The subliminal messaging of the gym could have been catering to this “damaging dominant regiment”, Dan reckoned. There had been certain decals (stickers) of people doing sporty things on the way down to the gyms – suggesting the gender and body type that was welcome in those spaces: muscular men in the weights room and netball-playing women in the cardio room. “And it was effectively subtly saying, these are the spaces for you and these are the spaces for you.”
Over summer, UniPol replaced the decals with plants for that “restorative outdoor connection”. They also repositioned certain machines in the weights room for privacy reasons, like the overtly sexual hip thrust machine popular for its butt-building function. “That’s in a corner area where you can do that with confidence,” Dan told Critic Te Ārohi. “Sometimes it can be daunting coming into a gym, so we're just trying to make that experience a little bit easier for people.”
One student, Brett, found that the changes were overall more stressful than calming. “I find that everytime I go there I have to do laps [of the gym] to try and find where they’ve moved everything.” Get your steps in, king. When asked about his take on the repositioning of the hip thrust, Brett said, “I’m not even sure where they’ve put it now. Not that I was looking.” Another student, Justin, was pissed that UniPol removed the pull up bars. “I’m not trying to take up an entire squat rack or set of cables just to do pull ups.” Both requested Critic to try to get UniPol to fix the air conditioning. What do we look like? A maintenance guy?
It’s the latest in UniPol’s constant evolution. Last July, UniPol introduced a “low stimulus” area in the Green Gym which the Otago Daily Times claimed had “been given the thumbs up by some neurodivergent students” in an article that neglected to include quotes from said students. UniPol reserved a section of one of their gyms in response to students’ feedback that the gym was “too busy”, with moans of having to queue for a squat rack.
If you enter the upstairs Green Gym and look to your left, you’ll find the gym equivalent of a cubicle-style shower set-up your hall of residence thinks provides adequate privacy. The space is blocked off with giant LEGO bricks (speckled with colour and white) and has “less industrial” equipment than the weights room’s stuff that goes “clunk”. Critic questioned UniPol about the noise from group fitness classes, based in the same room – arguably high stimulation given their mix of motivational instructions and encouragement from mic’ed up instructors and upbeat music. Dan replied, “Good question!” One without an answer besides avoiding the space during fitness class hours.
The intention was to provide a “low stimulation” space, but Dan admitted it was difficult to block out an entirely stimulation-free zone with the tools they have at hand. They’d considered things like “low stimulation hours” like some supermarkets have introduced, playing quieter music, dimming the lights and “shushing” any loud noises. But Dan explained it was unrealistic for the gym – they’d have to prohibit sport activities like basketball during those times and shoulder tap grunting and farting noise-cancelling-headphone-wearers.