Last August, Stuart Sugarman was pedaling his way through a spin class at an Upper East Side gym. The 49-year-old hedge fund manager was a permanent fixture at such classes — he used spinning to drop 75 pounds and became so enamored that he got his license to become an instructor. So it's understandable that when Sugarman got caught up in what his personal-injury attorney would later call a "euphoric experience," he began to grunt. Mind you, not a loud grunt — the "deep, guttural sound characteristic of a hog" that the dictionary speaks of. More like a casual one that fell halfway between a dog whistle and a full-throated laugh.
Christopher Carter, a stockbroker pedaling across the room, was peeved at this apparent lapse in decorum. Carter dismounted his bike and, according to a civil suit filed by Sugarman and his attorney, Samuel Davis, picked up the grunting man and his bike and pushed them through a Sheetrock wall. Sugarman spent 10 days in intensive care and underwent spinal-fusion surgery. When he emerged in his neck brace, he became a symbol for the class of people who feel that their vocal stylings have brought them a disproportionate amount of society's opprobrium. "Grunting is a First Amendment privilege!" Samuel Davis says, doing his best Clarence Darrow. "Grunting may be unpopular, but it's protected speech!"
Sugarman, it turns out, was not the only controversial grunter to attract public attention. Last May, Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees' third baseman, was running between second and third base when his teammate Jorge Posada hit a high infield pop-up. Rodriguez stood behind the Blue Jays' rookie third baseman, Howie Clark, and disgorged a grunt-like sound. Its precise nature remains in dispute. Rodriguez thought he said "Hey," while the Blue Jays insisted he was mimicking their infield calls. In any case, Clark became discombobulated and dropped the ball, and the Yankees won the game. Afterward, A-Rod said, "I don't know what my intention was." During this May's French Open, and every tournament thereafter, tennis commentators will officiate a favorite controversy: just which female tennis player has the loudest grunt. If you believe the papers, the reigning champ is Maria Sharapova, the so-called Queen of Grunts, who holds the unofficial women's record at 101 decibels — about as jolting as a police siren. Other contenders include the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, and the Italian Francesca Schiavone, whose roars have earned her the nickname "the Lioness."
There are very few scientists who volunteer themselves as experts on the precise nature of the grunt. In fact, there is only one: Dennis G. O'Connell of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. The first thing he would like to explain is that a grunt is sometimes known as "vocal disinhibition." The second thing is that no one knows definitively whether grunting while we work out or play tennis actually gives us a physiological boost. There's a theory that it inhibits certain neurons in our spinal column, allowing us more strength, but it has yet to be proven.
O'Connell always had a special thing for grunting, and for years subjected undergrads to grunting experiments. In 1999, he asked various subjects — including power lifters and casual exercisers — to grunt while they performed a dead lift. He found that by grunting they increased their force by an average of 1 to 5 percent — but these findings were only mathematically, not statistically, significant. Earlier this year, O'Connell began a study using tennis players. The data was still being tabulated as of press time, but O'Connell likes the look of the grunter's serves.
So while we wait to learn about grunting's physiological effects, we can speculate on its psychological ones. In the early 1990s, Monica Seles grunted her way to nine Grand Slam titles and became the game's top-ranked female player for two years running. At its peak, her ox-like bellow measured 93.2 decibels — not Sharapovian, but loud enough for the London tabloids to compare it to a freight train. This made Seles something of a pariah on the women's tour — Martina Navratilova once complained that Seles was making such a ruckus that she couldn't hear the ball come off the racket. What few people know is that Seles's grunting was not an unseemly habit but a deliberate competitive strategy, drilled into her by a sports psychologist named Jim Loehr.
Loehr, who is chairman and CEO of the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Florida, is the father of tennis grunting. There had long been grunters on tour, players like Vicki Palmer and Jimmy Connors, but never before had the grunt been harnessed as a performance tool. Grunting helps to relax the muscles, Loehr claims, and prevents the kind of stiffness that results in "iron elbow" — which can cause a forehand to find its way into the net. Loehr met Seles in 1986, when she was a timid and polite 12-year-old, a condition that carried over into her game. Loehr encouraged her to breathe out forcefully — to grunt — and soon the pint-size Seles became a ferocious, swaggering player. As the trophies piled up, Seles unleashed her full inner grunter. "She felt so good that it became more and more vocal," Loehr told me recently. When noises of discontent emerged from what one Wimbledon referee would later dub the "counter-grunt culture," Seles turned down the volume. "The world says stop, then she stops and she loses three consecutive finals," Loehr says. Seles reported receiving anguished fan letters that read, "Monica, you've got to grunt again."
The nature of grunt-hating can be directly tied to Seles's lips. It turns out grunting is not just a case of poor etiquette, like belching at the dinner table or forgetting to wipe the sweat off the StairMaster. What underlies the Seles case — and that of the spate of recent grunters like Stuart Sugarman and Alex Rodriguez — is gamesmanship. Grunting is about exerting power. "The alpha ape was a grunter," says Samuel Davis, and while this conclusion requires more study, it looks like he's on to something.
Consider the celebrated grunter Albert Argibay, of Wappingers Falls, New York, who was kicked out of a Planet Fitness health club in 2006 for violating the club's no-grunting policy. (Some Planet Fitness locations feature an alarm that is sounded when someone grunts too loudly.) Argibay hired Jason Stern, a Manhattan defense attorney, but they never brought a case to court. "I thought the public would be firmly behind my client," Stern says. "Sadly, it was split pretty evenly."
As it turns out, a grunting weight lifter was seen as a threatening figure, someone violating the physical space of those exercisers who prefer the Nautilus machine. Ditto Alex Rodriguez on the base paths and those women's tennis players — their grunts, too, took on a menacing tone. All were grunting at a delicate moment, when a little vocal disinhibition could tip the balance in a key tennis match or in the unwritten mores of the gym. For his part, Sugarman was also shouting inspirational phrases like "You go, girl!" — making him threatening, I suppose, if you find Richard Simmons threatening.
So the next time you're working out, turn up your iPod, commune with your StairMaster, or drown out the grunters with your own vocal disinhibition. And if you still have a problem with someone making a little noise in the gym, I've got one piece of advice: Take a deep breath.
