Please Brush Your Teeth Before Going to the Gym

Yes, you read that right: Before stepping foot into your health club or gym, you should thoroughly brush your teeth. After all, you're going to be huffing and puffing and breathing heavily near other people. Hasn't it ever dawned on you that they will smell your breath? Hello? How come so few people are smart enough to know this? Few things are worse than gym bad breath.

Recently I was at the gym pedaling a stationary bike, and with almost every inhalation, I suffered the stench of someone's breath. But oddly, nobody was really near me at all. I suspected a woman across the aisle on a bike, but at some point, she left, and I still smelled the odor.

I ruled out the man ahead of me on the elliptical, because he didn't seem close enough. The woman on my left, several bikes down, eventually left also. So that left only one person, a man several machines behind me on an elliptical or whatever. But he, too, didn't seem close enough.

But never underestimate the pervasiveness of human bad breath. A person with bad breath can actually create a zone of his or her breath that's a good 10 or 12 foot radius around their body. But both these men were more than 12 feet from me, and I highly doubted that I could pick up someone's bad breath whose back was facing me.

Thus, I finally concluded that the culprit was the man behind me...about 25 feet behind me. I figured that if he was breathing hard enough, it was very possible that I was getting wafts of his breath. Whom else could it have been? Well, one thing was for sure: SOMEONE had bad breath. SOMEONE didn't brush their teeth before going to the club. Shame on that person.

The man eventually left, and so did the odor! This problem is far more prevalent among men, I might add. Come on, folks, why can't you take five minutes before going to the gym, to brush your teeth? Even if you're coming from the workplace, bring with you a toothbrush and toothpaste and brush your teeth and mouth out at the gym. This isn't rocket science. Chances are, if you haven't brushed your teeth for a while, you are going to stink up the air within a 10 foot radius of your body.