I am stuck at the local YMCA, my mom got us a family membership years ago and I am not really going to ask for a seperate membership somewhere else. I just put up with the shit and do my things. Hopefully I’ll be doing joint enrollment at GT next year so I’ll be able to use their weight rooms which aren’t half bad but until then…
Yes, I haven’t seen deadlifts on the smith machine, no, I still haven’t figured out how it works. I have also seen some other creative work. In fact, I could count the basic exercises on one hand that I haven’t seen someone try in the smith… yes, I have seen someone do curls, which is worse than the horrific “curls in the power rack” syndrome that plagues many people. People really enjoy the mirrors to much, I think they believe they can lift more if they are closer to them, which is why I have also seen people lift the smith bar all the way up, and walk in to the machine with dumb-bells to do whatever it is that their little heart desires.
I think the worst oral experiences I have had in a gym though concern people who really just don’t know anything at all and I wonder how they function in the real world. Just the other day, I was doing good mornings, minding my own damn business when this astute gentleman comes over and informs me “That’s not how your supposed to do squats.” and he was very right. He continued “In fact, what your doing is just going to mess your back up. When you squat, you are supposed to go down with your legs… not your back.” and again, outside of the back injury comment, I couldn’t fault him; squats are about your legs more so than your back. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had read an article on squat form in glossy publication, but the critical problem we faced is that he didn’t realize I wasn’t doing squats. I smiled, thanked him for the advice, and went back to my good mornings. What else was I to do? I surely wasn’t going to explain good mornings to him, god knows he would ultimately end up accosting someone doing squats and inform them good mornings are done in a much different fashion.
One other small things that I have yet to understand is the “muscle” show at our gym. I live in a nice neighborhood and so I realize that inevitably the gym scene is going to be a social scene and meat market for some, but I am always baffled at the guys who have obviously juiced overzealously with the excess dough that is as much a source of problems in my neighborhood as a dearth of funds is five miles from here, across the railroad tracks. I have seen men with arms that are a beautiful and lean 17 or 18 inches spend well over an hour in the gym and do no more exercise than walk back and forth between the weight area and their gym bag with their cell phones. Unless they have too much time to kill and they spent the previous hour working their ass off, then I am at a loss here also. Oh, and then consider the fact that I have NEVER seen them at the gym before, nor do I ever see these people again. I know its them and not me, because I go to the gym during all sorts of time windows, we don’t train at differnt times, I train and I don’t see them.
At this point I am presented with a further propistion. Obviously , they ahve do to some lifting, I mean you can’t get 18 inches off nothing but juice so clearly they do something. Are they members at other gyms then and have decided to come to our gym just to model for the day? I don’t know. Like I said in the begining, I am there to get what I can out of it. I don’t really talk to anyone there beyond swapping equipment and helping the staff pick up weights that people leave all over. That is something else I don’t understand. I am more than understanding if someone is going to do circuits in the weight area, I’ll try to give them as much room as they need and unless I desperately need a weight they are using, I will try to rearrange my workout to facilitate their efforts but when they leave four pairs of dumb-bells scattered in the weight area… you can be damn sure that next time I see them in the gym trying to do a circuit I help them clean up between my sets, systematically putting away the weights they are going to use next. They don’t say anything either which is the funniest part.
So moral of the story is this. People go to the gym for different reasons. Some people go there to meet other people, some people go because they think they are worth being met, and some people go because they are tired of being sedentary fat asses and want to be better people. Then, there is the rarest specimen of gym goers, those who go there for the love of the game, those who know what they came for, those who know how to do it, and then get it done. I am happy with my reasons for going and as long as other people’s reasons don’t interfere with mine, who am I to criticize them for getting out of the gym what they want from it?
But did I tell you about the guy who does overhead presses in the power rack…?