... How does that work?

It's really weird, I mean I can understand that people (honestly mostly women) dislikes having a ton of random people chatting them up at the gym. It probably gets tiresome really quickly.

On the other hand you have people just staring into their phone between sets, so it seems like a good time to talk. There might be no overlap between these groups of people, but we have a epidemic of people complaining about being lonely while we also have people spewing out "Don't talk to me ever" and who freezes if the person behind the register at the supermarket has the audacity to talk to them.