Surely, you know a Ripster: He's the bookish, aloof, skinny-jeaned dude whose layers of American Apparel hide the muscles he has painstakingly spent hours honing alongside the meatheads at the gym. Of course, you don't know you know a guy like this, because no self-respecting Ripster would ever admit to someone he knows that beneath that carefully tousled exterior lies a heart so vain that Fabio himself would gasp.

But Ripsters being hipsters, they have to talk to someone about their feelings, and so today, some of them let it all out to the Observer about how hard it is to be buff and a nerd. Anonymously, of course.

You don’t want to be the guy in the gym with the 200-pound bench-press guy. Not just because those guys are generally assholes, but doing that kind of workout is going to make you look like one of those assholes. It’s maybe embarrassing to admit that degree of self-consciousness about it, but even in college I tailored my workouts to look like the guy who looks fit but doesn’t spend too much time in the gym.

We'd say that local gyms should capitalize on the Ripster trend and offer something along the lines of “Shoegazer Spin Classes." Except no one could ever be seen at one of them. And you know, once the Observer gets ahold of something, it's totally over anyway.

Nerds Of Steel [NYO]