Joined a new gym last night. Hilarious

[Toasterleavings]

Chalk. On cable bicep curls. Grunting like a bull elephant in musth. With a completely color coordinated gym outfit. Down to the shoelaces and carefully placed baseball hat and styled hair.

Peacock gunna peak bro.

[mev20]

This is because every guy who puts the pad on the bar neither does warmups nor squats below parallel, he just puts a 45lb plate on each side and does partial squats with it. Occasionally one will follow this up with a second 45lb plate with even shallower partial squats. A third plate is rare, but if ever tried with a slight grimacing knee dip, is invariably followed by walking away leaving all the plates on the bar.

This perfectly describes nearly all of the squatting at my gym (by guys).

[Kyle Schuant]

This perfectly describes nearly all of the squatting at my gym (by guys).

This behaviour is universal in mainstream gyms. Likewise, Monday is International Bench Press and Curl day. Across the Western world, in every. Single. Big box gym. Always.

Likewise you will see women on the treadmill walking at 4km/hr reading a magazine, and on the elliptical listening to music, and later doing partial crunches.

Bosus and Zumba and tricep kickbacks and glute bridges come and go, but partial squats with the pad on the bar, magazine reading on the treadmill and partial crunches will remain.

[MrDoh]

So i just relocated from my home country to California. After two weeks of total shitstorm finally i manage to get myself into a gym again. To my surprise, the gym is quite decent for a non-powerlifting/oly gym. They allowed chalk, with multiple bench stations, one power cage, and one squat rack, all with quality bars with usable knurling. Most of em' are thicker than the Eleiko i used to workout with, but still have Olympic marks. Except for one bar that is noticeably thinner, but have powerlifting marks on the squat rack.But that they uses this kind of plate:



As you can imagine, it make deadlift rather infuriating. Still, first day and i already seen many funny things:

+Woman warm up with front squat, then proceed to put on 135 and deadlift. I wouldn't mind, and she did seemed to try to control the descent, but everytime drop the bar a loud bang echoed throughout the free weight area. I was like "shit, i had three plates on and i didn't make this much noise". She did like 2 sets and proceed to exit the area.

+Scrawny kid with pink belt (the same kind of belt many woman in the crossfit games used, funnily enough) get one of the bar from a bench station and proceed to do deadlift right in front of it. Considering i deadlifted right in front of the squat rack (but still plenty of space behind - it is not like anyone is using it anyway as the power cage is available), it wasn't so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the kid loaded like 250 pounds or something, and then do some of the ugliest deadlift i've seen to date. Round back, hips shot up, everything. And he got what i think was football wide receiver glove (or one of those Rogue weightlifting gloves).

+Woman squat on the smith machine

+A big swole black personal trainer and staff there was showing a rather red necky fella around the free weight area. And talks about how he prefer to squat on the smith machine because "he doesn't want too much weight on his back). Fuck me. It really is saying something when some people can get away with such bullshit and still looks like they can deadlift a cow if they want to.

+2 middle eastern guy in long tights was working out together. They actually did ATG high bar with good form, but didn't rerack the weight for whatever reasons.

+Me who do Pendlay Rows inside the power rack. To my defense, barely anyone was using the squat rack or the power cage. By my estimate, around that time of the day only 3 people used either of those items.

[MBasic]

As you can imagine, it make deadlift rather infuriating.

. . .never seen those before . . . .

Still better than "hex" plates or 8-sided plates.
Those you have, once you get to 225 / 315 just rotate them so at least some of the round parts are off-set and touching the ground.

[PaulBeech]

It's not hilarious but has anyone ever seen people do touch and go deadlifts with absolutely no eccentric? They are fucking terrifying and must be jarring the fuck out of your joints and spine.

[Skander]

There was a guy who was generally very loud (giving birth to a water buffalo through his anal canal, perhaps) during his reps (weighted lunges mostly), but between sets he sort of mumbled under his breath. Maybe he was singing to the music from his headphones or something. The best part came when he was psyching himself up for some 3 plate/side calf exercises on the leg press: Right as he was about to start, his loudest mumble was "Honor!"

I like the idea that for him, honor means having large calves.

[MrDoh]

Second day at the gym. Putting on 225 to do ATG high bar after 2 weeks of non-training. This one turned out to be quite hard, in fact hard enough for me to miss the last rep on the third set. So i will have to reset again and work my way back up. During my squat though, after the first set i was walking around to get all the lactic acid from the quads to go somewhere when a guy came into the squat rack to try out 225. Couldn't even get below quarter before quickly rerack the weight and mumbled "dammit" to himself under his breath. Apparently he was doing shrugs with 3 plates+, alternate grips with tissue on each hand. Buy some strap, mate.

[Bart Hakvoort]

(...) Right as he was about to start, his loudest mumble was "Honor!"

I like the idea that for him, honor means having large calves.

Maybe it was: "Hodor!"

[perman]

It's not hilarious but has anyone ever seen people do touch and go deadlifts with absolutely no eccentric? They are fucking terrifying and must be jarring the fuck out of your joints and spine.

Touch-and-go with absolutely no eccentric? To me, that sounds like letting go of the bar, then catching it right after it bounces while immediately starting the pull back up. Actually sounds fairly acrobatic to me.