Here’s the Right Way to Approach Your Gym Crush

You know, meeting people offline isn’t easy. Once you’re post-college, your options for finding true love IRL are limited. You can hang out at bars, wait for a mutual friend introduction, or hope for a Hollywood-worthy meet cute.

So while we’re all about heading to the gym with a one-minded purpose of getting in a serious, focused workout, we also get that romance has to start somewhere — and for some people, that’s the gym.

That said, there are many, many ways to be creepy at the gym and to do more harm than good. While a lot of gym etiquette surrounding finding love can be left to common sense — i.e. for heaven’s sake, don’t interrupt them in the middle of a workout to hit on them — MyProtein recently conducted a survey on all things love and fitness.

The survey had 2,365 respondents, aged 18 to 70. And while plenty of people may say “no thanks” to gym flirting, according to the survey, 85 percent of respondents were totally fine with romantic attention at the gym. And apparently, that means they’re also comfortable going for it: 29 percent of the respondents said they’d tried gym flirting — and over half of them said they did so successfully.

Unsurprisingly, the men in the survey were more open to flirting than the women — 88 percent of men gave the thumbs up to flirting, while only 76 percent of women felt the same. Also interesting: The survey found that older populations were more open to gym flirting than those 18 to 24 years old.

But like we said, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it. “Stare at them” earned the top spot as the worst way to woo a date, according to 41 percent of respondents. And showing off in front of your gym crush won’t win you any brownie points either: 18 percent of respondents voted this as the worst way to flirt.

If you’ve been wanting to ask out the cutie on the battle ropes for a while now, we’ve got good news. According to 54 percent of respondents, the best strategy is a simple one: “Just smile and try to make conversation.” Our interpretation: There’s no need for cheesy pickup lines or crazy stunts. Just act like a normal human talking to another human. Easy, right?

If that fails, you can also choose the second-most popular way to flirt: making friends with their friends, then trying to talk to them that way. Hey, it’s worth a shot!

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