Joined a new gym last night. Hilarious

[FatButWeak]

A friend of mine had a good definition of "sport" -- if you could play it in slow-motion with the Olympic theme playing in the background, and it doesn't look silly, then it's a sport.

Noit bad. My definition of sport is that if you can compete at a high level wearing sunglasses, jewelry and using tobacco (chew or smoke) its not a sport. yes this means baseball is not a sport.

[PaulBeech]

its not hilarious, perhaps even awesome, but it always makes me laugh. There is a guy in here who is a good bencher. Just recently i have been encouraging him to go heavier and we are now almost at 300lbs. The bit that makes me laugh is that he absolutely will not listen to me when i tell him how many reps to do. So i will say do one rep and he agrees. When he does it i go to help him re rack the bar and he pulls the bar back down to his chest....with my hands still attached to the bar! He smashed his last weeks pr by adding an extra three reps to it this week, and then got a 10lb pr! He is awesome.

[drlvegas]

Pfft. I can do that.

Crash on a bike?

[Skander]

Currently have a summer teaching gig at a prestigious west coast women's college (co-ed for the summer). I was glad to find they have a gym, though it's tiny. However, there is a squat rack, thank god, bench, incline benches, and even some off-off-brand bumper plates. The bars even rotate ok and they have (white, squishy) foam rollers.

The bad: dumbbells only go up to 50 (my current program, written by my coach, calls for DB incline bench for some reason, but no way that's gonna work) - for the plates, I think their total weight is somewhere under 600 pounds. The flooring is that jigsaw puzzle matting, but it has weird bubbles and bumps so it's not totally even, and the bar is a weird york that has that strange sideways play so the walkout is pretty bizarre. Also, there are mirrors on both sides of the gym, so you get that infinity and beyond thing. Finally, it's only open from 4-8, and will be serving some 300+ students and faculty all summer.

It was mostly women (on cardio machines or doing bizarre 'toning' workouts) when I was lifting, but one guy came in, and made his way towards the weight area. Then veered towards the mats, where he did endless, strange calisthenics. Finally, he moves towards the bench, so I assumed at least he'd do one real lift...instead, he proceeds to hop from one side of the bench to the other. Of course, the heaviest thing I see him do is curls, but thank god he didn't use the squat rack (presumably because I had completely colonized it).

Oh, they also have a "row bench" - it's like a bench, but for rows. WTF?

[Dastardly]

Row benches are legit. They work best if you have cambered bar though.

[jgalak]

Wow, just read all 9500+ posts... Kept me busy for like two weeks...

[Skander]

Row benches are legit. They work best if you have cambered bar though.

Not with the 50# fixed weight baby barbells people there are using...But still, it seems weird that they have not one, but TWO of these rowing benches, when you really could just row off the floor. I guess you're limited somewhat by the posterior chain in a Pendlay row, but not THAT much.

[jgalak]

This thread fell off the first page. This is not acceptable, and I will therefore do something about it.

I go to a typical Golds Gym - lots of machines, lots of curlers, one power rack (which I usually have to myself), two squat racks with no safety rails. As many incline benches as flat.

Guy in the gym last week, wearing sunglasses, baseball cap, hoodie (with the hood up over the cap), and a pair of Beats by Dr Dre headphones over the hood. That's right, he had the hood material between the headphones and his ears. I knew the headphone was reputed to have poor quality, but I didn't think it was _that_ bad. Didn't see him actually exercise, just kind of wander around the free weight area.

The other weirdness was a guy in an elitefts sweatshirt standing in a squat rack, in front of the mirror, doing curls with no weight. I don't men no weight on the bat - I mean no bar at all! Just curling his arms as of he was holding a bar, watching himself in the mirror...

[melody]

I trained at a Crossfit gym today, so I was that asshole doing curls and dumbbell rows. Heaviest db they had was 45#. Told me they are strength biased. Also get their programming from main page.

[Philbert]

I trained at a Crossfit gym today, so I was that asshole doing curls and dumbbell rows. Heaviest db they had was 45#. Told me they are strength biased. Also get their programming from main page.

One of the bolded statements is false. This is what is known as, by analogy to mathematics, a "strength training identity."