Autistic folks and the gym
I write a lot about autism, neurodiversity and Mad Studies in general. That's because I am autistic, I have several manifestations of sensory hypersensitivity, and I'm a multi-disciplinary scholar. As such, I'm an "insider" to several sciences from which good, not so great, and outright negative content about both autism and exercise has been produced.
What matters to us here in this platform is how being autistic affects our experience as athletes or just people at a gym. For example, we aren't capable of playing social games. Most of us can identify that one is going on and few of us have been trained by some neurotypical person to say the right lies to participate. But it's just a meaningless ritual.
I don't know if my extreme heat intolerance, or if my hyperacusis or dysosmia are related to autism. It would make sense but things are rarely well-behaved. I found no studies comparing the incidence of these traits among diagnosed autistic individuals versus groups within the same cohort that were not diagnosed. Even a study like that would still be uninformative. We’d need a study measuring the association of those traits with neurodivergencies, or specifically divergent behavioral phenotypic traits. Anyway, all these things got worse with more and more episodes of being exposed to intense stimuli - too much heat, or loud low frequency noise, etc.
This picture was taken the last time I was at Planet Fitness to do my cardio. Usually sciatica doesn't bother me in this specific type of stationary bike. This day it did. I don't know why. Probably because of heat exposure but I can't discard the stress created by an apparently stupid thing. As you can see in the picture, ALL the cardio machines were free. As soon as I set up mine, an older white man sat right beside me. The bikes are now very close to each other because there is a big sign instructing people to "leave one machine between you and the next person".
I don't pay attention to people. In some part of my brain I noticed that a large thing was there, right beside me. I looked. His mouth moved. I unlooked. Pain kept rising. And rising. The thing was still there and then I was very aware of it. The pain reached an easy 9 or 10. I left limping badly. The rest of the day was a disaster.
Many things here:
1) Boundaries: it's always a horrible idea to sit RIGHT beside anyone in an empty environment. It's creepy. And I do think it's done to make the other person uncomfortable. I regret not having been an asshole to that guy - I was in too much pain to elaborate an effective aggression (and I excel on those).
2) Environmental stimuli: the fewer, the better. The chance that I will like the same music as you do is minimal. Why play anything, then? In a time when everyone has their whole music collection in their phone, it makes zero sense to have ambient music.
3) We don't know what is harmful to other people. If there is a chance that something can be harmful - like loud music, touching, getting too close, crossing personal space boundaries, strong smells, etc. - it must be avoided.