Well, another holiday meant another day in a globo-style gym witnessing humanity's finest. Story takes place in a big YMCA in southeastern PA. Too much awful to remember it all. Some of my favorites were:
Older gentleman doing some king of dynamic kipping face pulls on a TRX, where he'd start out holding the handles about chest height while leaning forward, then pull his arms up over his ears with his elbows bent while dynamically thrusting his hips to end in an upright position.
An average-looking dude (meaning not skinny, and not ripped) wearing a nylon weightlifting belt and Chucks (was hoping he'd turn out to be a powerlifter, but no luck) doing an endless circuit of mis-using whatever machine or apparatus was open in an overly crowded gym. He never adjusted the belt, just put it on when he got to the gym and left it the entire time. Besides some really light seated cable rows with only 1 foot on the platform, his best move was using the assisted dip/pullup machine to do some kind of bent-over bench press motion with his hands on the sides of the pad. Never did anything heavy, or for high reps.
One guy did deadlifts. One. On a gymnastics mat, so he and the plates were both on a squishy surface. Had a plate and some change on the bar. Big enough looking dude. Lots of Smith Machine quarter squats, and the biggest bro-iest dude of all did some behind the back shrugs with 2 plates while making plenty of noise so everyone knew he was moving such massive weight (180 lbs) over a whopping 2" ROM. Although his traps were bigger than mine, so maybe I should shut up.
Oh, and the absolute worst barbells I've ever seen. 32mm at least, totally rusty, worthless knurl, and an end-cap design but without the end cap so you could actually stick your finger down in the end of the barbell. I hope they were somewhere close to 45 lbs. One of them actually spun okay, but the others had been dropped and dinged so many times, which, along with the rust, made plate changes a workout of its own, since the ends of the bar were deformed enough that you really had to work to wedge the plates on.
Glad to be home.
Sounds like a great gym! :-) Our local YMCA was the same way. They had a bunch of those garbage bars that were practically as thick as a Texas Squat bar. They are not so bad for benching, but horribad for DL. Most of them were sprung too. A local businessman paid for a couple million dollar addition to the gym, but his one stipulation was that they had to build a powerlifting area. He is in his 60's, but he still does NASA powerlifting meets for fun. Well, they managed to mess that up to. So in this huge addition, there is one DL platform and two hammer strength power racks. I was happy to see the DL platform, but you would think they would have at least one competition squat rack or monolift. Big guys need the hooks in! :-) They added one bench too, but it wasn't one you would see in a competition. They got new bars, which are a slight upgrade, but still nothing that is even the quality of a Texas power bar. Basically they went cheap to save money for a lot of the horrible machines they added. I like machines, but these don't feel right at all. Many people have complained about it actually. You would think with MILLIONS of dollars that they could have built something pretty cool... guess not.
I visited a new gym today. Not particulary horrible - one squat rack (empty as the rest of the gym), all-wooden floor. Only the bar I used for squats (I couldn't choose, all the bars were the same) bended around my back with 160 kilos on. Not a good feeling, the whip...
Got day passes to a locally-owned establishment for our holiday trip and boy... look, I wouldn't have minded the old-ass plates, but the bars were dreadful. One had no knurling AT ALL, two had non-standard knurling that was more like a light embossing, and the only one with anything like a texture to it (which was still rubbish) was so bent that I could only deadlift if I carefully rotated it so the bend was uppermost before pulling.
Weirdly, I saw more squatting there (both quarter-reps and legit) in three visits than I usually do in a month at my gym, which has infinitely better equipment.
Someone call the fire department ASAP.And if you insist on using [gloves], make sure they match your purse.
-Rippetoe