So Someone Asked Why You Wear Briefs
A ladder of possible answers, from one word to the full lecture nobody asked for, and an honest account of the time I climbed all of it.
The Locker Room Strut: A Field Manual
A field manual for carrying yourself in a changing room: the approach, the bench, the pace, the eyes, the towel and the exit. The advice underneath is real.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend. More on how this works.
There is a laminated notice on the wall of my gym setting out the rules of the changing room. It covers glass bottles, mobile phones, the sauna timer and the instruction to shower before entering the pool. It says nothing at all about the thing every man in that room is actually managing, which is the ninety seconds between taking his trousers off and getting his shorts on.
That interval has no signage and no training. Men improvise it badly for thirty years and then, somewhere in their forties, work out that it was never a test and never had an examiner.
What follows is the manual nobody issued. The advice underneath it is not a joke at all: bearing is learnable, almost all of it is posture and pace, and the fastest route to being comfortable in a room is to conduct yourself as though you already are, which sounds like a trick and is in fact just how the nervous system works.
This is the practical companion to The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs, which deals with the fear itself. This one assumes you have decided to go in anyway and would like to know what to do with your hands.
The doctrine, stated once
The manual has a single doctrine and everything below it is elaboration.
A man who moves at a normal speed, looks at ordinary things and finishes what he is doing without commentary is invisible. A man doing any of those three at the wrong intensity is briefly interesting, and then, within about four minutes, also invisible. There is no third outcome.
The mistake most men make is trying to be invisible by being small: hunched, fast, apologetic, angled into a corner. Smallness is a signal in itself and the room reads it accurately. Ordinariness is the objective, and ordinariness is a rhythm rather than a size.
Phase one: the approach
The approach begins at the door and ends when your bag is down.
Enter with a destination. Choose a locker in the first three seconds and go to it directly, even if it is a worse locker than the one two rows over. The failure mode here is the lap, in which a man walks the full length of the room reading locker numbers with his coat still on, turns, and walks back. The lap looks like nothing, and yet the man performing it feels every step of it, which is the part that matters. You are not being judged. You are, however, giving yourself thirty seconds of unstructured time in a room you already feel odd about, and that is a self inflicted wound.
Bag down first. Coat off second. Undressing while holding a bag is a logistics problem disguised as a confidence problem, and a surprising number of men have never separated the two.
If the room is full, take the space that exists rather than the space you wanted. Hovering behind a man at his locker, waiting for a better position, is the one genuinely uncomfortable manoeuvre in the whole building, and it is uncomfortable for him as well as for you. Further guidance on the shared etiquette of the room is set out in The Unwritten Rules of the Communal Changing Room.
Phase two: the bench, and the geometry of the room
Nobody has ever been told where to sit. It is remarkable, given how much of the problem it solves.
The bench is a shared surface and not a first come, first served territory. The operating rule is a body's width of clearance where a body's width exists, and no direct facing where the room offers an alternative. A changing room has an unspoken grid to it and men navigate it correctly almost all of the time on pure instinct. The exceptions are nearly always someone who has stopped thinking about the room entirely, which is its own kind of achievement.
Sit down to take your socks off. This is the single most useful physical instruction in the manual. The standing sock removal is a balance exercise performed on one leg by a man who has not warmed up, and the flailing that follows is less a dignity issue than a genuine hazard on a wet tiled floor. Sitting also stabilises everything above it: shoulders drop, the hurry goes out of the arms, and you have accidentally adopted the posture of a man with all the time in the world.
Do not spread. The bench is not a desk. Most disputes in a changing room are territorial rather than sartorial, and none of them are ever spoken aloud.
Phase three: pace, and the two enemies
Pace is the most legible thing about you in that room, more than build, more than kit, considerably more than what you have on under your trousers. There are two failure modes and they are opposites.
The first is the scramble. Trousers off and shorts on in one continuous motion at a speed that suggests a fire alarm, usually with the shorts threaded onto both feet in advance. The scramble is exhausting, it goes wrong regularly, and it broadcasts the exact discomfort it is trying to conceal. It is also, in fairness, what nearly every man does at nineteen.
The second is theatrical slowness. This is the overcorrection: a man demonstrating his ease at a pace normally reserved for unpacking a delicate instrument. He towels one forearm at a time. He examines his shorts before putting them on. Slowness performed at an audience is just as loud as speed performed at an audience, with the additional disadvantage of taking longer.
Correct pace is the speed at which you would put on a coat in a hallway. Not brisk, not deliberate. Coat speed. If you want a single thing to take away from the manual, take that.
Kit that fits helps enormously, because most of the fidgeting that ruins a man's pace is adjustment. A brief cut correctly does not need to be pulled at, resettled or checked, and a great deal of the awkwardness men attribute to nerves is in fact a leg opening that has rolled, which is diagnosed properly in How a Brief Should Actually Fit. A well cut navy cotton stretch brief removes a whole category of small hand movements from the operation.
Phase four: where to put your eyes
This is the section men most want guidance on and least want to admit wanting guidance on.
The rule is that eyes go to whatever your hands are doing, and to the middle distance in between. Your locker. Your bag. The floor in transit. This is not a discipline of avoidance; it is where anyone's eyes go when occupied with a task, and occupation is the whole point.
Two positions to avoid. The ceiling, because a man staring upward while changing has the bearing of someone enduring a medical procedure. And the phone, which is a separate problem entirely, has caused real trouble in real gyms, and functions here as a public declaration that you needed something to hold. Put it in the locker.
If you meet someone's eye, nod. The nod is a complete social transaction in this environment and requires no follow up. Do not upgrade it into conversation while either man is mid change, a rule that seems obvious and is broken constantly by men who have known each other for twenty years. The taxonomy of the men who break it is set out with some care in The Nine Men You Meet in Every Changing Room.
Phase five: the towel question
There are three recognised towel doctrines and the manual takes no side.
Towel as garment, in which the towel is worn at the waist and the change is executed underneath it. This has real advantages in a busy room and one drawback, which is that it converts a two handed operation into a one handed one, and the towel drop is a more common event than its adherents admit.
Towel as tool, in which the towel dries you and then hangs on a hook, doing no other work. This is the continental default, the pool default, and the one requiring least equipment management.
Towel as flag, in which the towel is carried, folded, unfolded, refolded and held at various heights according to who has entered the room. This is not a doctrine so much as an anxiety with a textile attached, and it is the most tiring option by a distance.
The instruction is not which to pick. It is to pick before you arrive, and then to do the same thing every week. A man who decides his towel policy at the door is making a fresh decision under mild social pressure every single time, which is precisely the condition he is trying to escape. On equipment, a proper quick drying gym towel that packs small is worth more here than people expect, because a heavy wet towel is what turns the exit into a wrestling match.
Phase six: kit, briefly
Dark colours read as considered. This has nothing to do with what is objectively good and everything to do with what a room full of men parses in half a second, and there is no virtue in fighting a battle you did not choose on a Tuesday morning. Save the white classic for the point at which you have stopped noticing. If you are building the habit from scratch, Making the Switch: The 14-Day Brief Plan handles the sequencing.
Sport dictates the garment, not fashion, and there is no changing room in Britain or Ireland where a well chosen sports brief with flatlock seams is out of place among men who lift, sprint or swim, which is the subject of The Jockstrap Never Left the Locker Room. For the pool the calculation differs again, and is set out in Brief, Jammer or Shorts: What to Actually Wear for Lap Swimming.
Phase seven: the exit
Two failures dominate.
The first is the mirror. A man who stops at it on his way out has reopened a file he had successfully closed, and will now spend the walk to the door thinking about his shoulders. Walk past. The mirror is for shaving.
The second is the return, which involves coming back for the thing you left on the bench. It is not embarrassing, merely a second trip you did not need to make, and it is prevented entirely by packing your bag in reverse order of use before you leave the house. Whatever you need first goes in last.
Leave at coat speed. Take your rubbish. That is the manual.
What the manual is actually for
None of this is about being watched, because you are not being watched. It is about the gap between how a man feels and how he moves, and the fact that the traffic between those two runs in both directions.
The received wisdom is that you have to feel confident before you can act it. That has it backwards, or at least only half right. Posture, pace and where you put your eyes are inputs as much as outputs. Standing up straight, moving at coat speed and looking at ordinary things does not merely disguise discomfort; over a handful of visits it reliably reduces it, because the brain takes evidence from the body, and there is nothing much it can conclude from a man behaving normally except that things are normal.
Which is the joke at the centre of all this. The strut is not a strut. It is the total absence of one. Everything here is an instruction to do less, more slowly, with your shoulders where they already were, and the reason it needs seven phases and a laminated tone of voice is that men will absorb a procedure long after they have stopped listening to reassurance.
Go in. Put the bag down. Sit to take your socks off. Nothing happens, and then it keeps on not happening, and one day you notice you stopped keeping count. How many pairs you need in rotation to sustain that is dealt with in The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them.
Whether any of this survives contact with a gym floor is a fair question, and the men who train several times a week have answered it at length in The Postbag: Letters from the Gym Floor.
Questions people ask
How do I stop feeling self conscious in a gym changing room?
Change your behaviour before you try to change your feelings. Choose a locker immediately rather than walking a lap, put your bag down before you start undressing, sit to remove socks and shoes, and move at the speed you would use to put on a coat. Keep your eyes on whatever your hands are doing. These are physical habits rather than mental ones, which makes them far easier to control, and the reduced discomfort follows the changed behaviour rather than the other way round.
Is it rude to change without a towel in a communal changing room?
No. Communal changing rooms exist for changing, and doing it without a towel is normal across most of Europe and entirely accepted in Britain and Ireland. What matters more is the practical etiquette: leave a reasonable gap on the bench, avoid facing someone directly if the room allows an alternative, keep your belongings within your own space, and never use a phone or camera in the room. If you prefer a towel, use one. It is a personal preference, not a rule.
What underwear should I wear to the gym?
Something close fitting with flat seams and a fabric that manages moisture, which in practice means a brief, a trunk or a short boxer brief in a cotton blend, merino or a technical knit. Loose boxers are the worst option for most training because the fabric moves independently of you and bunches under shorts. Flatlock seams matter more than the style label, since raised overlock ridges are the usual cause of chafing during longer sessions.
How long should it take to get changed at the gym?
There is no correct duration and nobody is timing you. A useful benchmark is the speed at which you would put on a coat in a hallway, because both rushing and conspicuous slowness are more noticeable than an ordinary pace. Packing your bag in reverse order of use, so the first thing you need is the last thing in, removes most of the fumbling. Once you stop treating it as an event it takes a couple of minutes.
Where should you look in a men's changing room?
At whatever you are doing: your locker, your bag, the floor while walking. This is where anyone's eyes go naturally when occupied with a task, and being genuinely occupied is what makes it easy. If you make eye contact with someone, a brief nod is a complete and sufficient exchange. Avoid extended eye contact, and keep your phone in the locker, since phone use in changing rooms is prohibited in most facilities for good reason.