I may be going a bit out on a limb here, but the last 2 days have confirmed this for me:
The number one benefit of owning a garage gym is the ability to blast wicked gas without any concern for its affect on others. Pressure building at the top of a squat in the middle of set? Say it loud and say it proud.
One of the downfalls of when my wife moved her treadmill into the garage was that I could no longer do this. Thankfully, when we moved to a northern tier location, she moved back into the house.
I always figured it was a right if the lift was respectable.
Wait, you guys don’t crop dust people in public gyms to get them off the equipment? I thought that was the whole point of protein powder.
I have found all I have to do is ask. People are so conflict adverse they will readily flee equipment when asked to share.
Gym for women only were invented in the first place not for the women themselves but for men who were tired of trying to deal with middle aged or older women in the gym
For the last five days, I haven’t been able to get the song “Despacito” out of my head. How many days until this is considered permanent brain damage?
It dissipates around the seven day mark.
Despacito-pates
Works like a charm.
The reverse works as well:
Say I’m squatting and someone wants the rack. I see them standing and watching my every move. I walk up to them directly and say “you want to work in?”
Response 99% of the time: no, no im warming up, or I’ll wait or I’ll do something else.
Sheep everywhere.
The ones that say yes are the ones that bother me because it’s inevitably someone who wants to squat 25’s so I’ve got to strip the whole bar.
I confess that I don’t particularly like working in with the powerlifters at my gym. Lots of great lifters, but they take too damn long between sets. ESPECIALLY once they start busting out the shirts, bands, boards, reverse bands, suits, boxes, blocks, reverse power blocks and other power paraphernalia.
I’ll sometimes jump in with deadlifts. They usually move along at a good pace, provided the group doesn’t get side-tracked with tales of powerlifting meet drama.
I’ll also confess that I really enjoy lifting around those people, even if I don’t really want to do what they do.
One of the best workouts I ever had was with a guy that was shrugging 9 plates per side while I was squatting 495. In between each set we’d completely strip the bar, change the level, and put all the plates back on. Very little downtime.
Perhaps the problem with power lifting is that most of us never encounter anyone near the top of the game. It’s all mediocre guys at the gym and when it comes down to it, they look like fat guys who justify their fatassness with a big lift.
I work with a guy that I love but I think he’s pushing his weight to 270 and he’s around 6 foot tall. He’s strong but not elite strong. The reality is that he looks like a bowling ball with legs.
I think he’d be better off losing weight and being a monster at 220 lbs. But I guess it’s easy to eat for gains…
Typically, the vicious cycle is that you get so used to eating a ton of food and lifting that, once you stop doing that, you feel “weaker” in the weightroom. You might even observe a slight dip in your numbers while you adjust. For a lot of guys that identify themselves based off being “big and strong”, they simply can’t handle this assault on their identity, and they doubledown on eating huge and staying “big”.
I know I went through that. I ate enough to put on 30lbs, with the vast majority of it being pretty unclean weight, but I didn’t want to lose weight and see my numbers drop. Took a long while before I finally realized I wasn’t doing myself any favors being fat.
Not at my gym. I’ve got a top-ranked 165’er, a retired SHW with a 2400-something total, a soon-to-be husband/wife pair who both placed top 3 at the Arnold Sports Festival, a 181 who got best lifter at a regional USAPL meet, and a handful of rather mediocre lifters like me.
Kevin Oak has a great line comparing his training #s for the 242 class vs. the 220 class. To paraphrase: yeah, the #s are higher, but I don’t feel like I got stronger, it’s just that the weights got lighter…
(that’s elite lifter talk, of course)
As I got started as a teenager I wanted to look like these two guys…
For the younger guys their names were Hawk and Animal The Road Warriors.
I think I may be the strongest guy in my gym (I know I am during the time slot I work out in) and I never thought that would be so depressing.
#humblebrag #firstworldproblems
Just teasing.
I’m in the same boat. It is sometimes sapping to motivation. But I do train in an Anytime Fitness in the middle of nowhere, so sadly it’s not an environment that really encourages progress.